


A World for Dreams - Revisited

by Eireann, mandassina



Series: Dreams [1]
Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: Drama, F/F, F/M, Gen, Horror, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 16:00:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 28
Words: 64,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13461630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eireann/pseuds/Eireann, https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandassina/pseuds/mandassina
Summary: A revised and expanded version of my previous story 'A World for Dreams', with a considerable number of new chapters, because Mandassina had the idea of how to make it so much better.Follow-up to 'The Dispossessed' and 'Big Bad Wolf'. All is calm in the Mirror Universe, and everything seems to be going smoothly - until Major Reed makes a visit to the Jupiter Shipyards, where he encounters some old friends.Part 1 of the 'Dreams' series.





	1. 00: The Prologue: Orders (Commander Charles Tucker)

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Star Trek and all its intellectual property belongs to Paramount/CBS. No infringement intended, no money made.
> 
> Authors' Notes: From the moment I got sucked into the Enterprise fanfic universe, Eireann has been one of my favorite authors. In a few weeks, I had read her entire Jag series and most of her other works, staying up late and going to work like a zombie because I just couldn't turn away. When I finally got around to posting my first few stories, I did quite a lot of fangirl squealing (not attractive behavior in a middle-aged woman, but I couldn't help myself) to find she had left me lovely reviews on every one. One in particular left me grinning for days because it showed we were on the same wavelength, as she discovered when I posted the next chapter.  
> Back in October, when she gifted me the original version of this story, I was thrilled, delighted, flattered, and did some more fangirl squealing (it was still not attractive). I was privileged to beta it, and that experience plus the thoughtful reviews she had left me emboldened me to approach her when I saw potential for a sequel(ae). I sent her a couple of scenes that had been percolating in my brain since I'd beta’ed this, and she agreed that there was more story to tell. Then she generously offered to collaborate with me on some additional chapters to this story, in order to set up the sequel, which we have been assembling for a while now.  
> This has been a true collaboration. Eireann Brit-picked my slim additions to the Malcolm parts, and I Trip-picked her Tucker parts. Sometimes, I would be working on a scene until late in the evening, finally quit owing to the need for sleep, and come back to it the next day to find it finished, not at all in the way I'd imagined, but so beautifully done that I happily abandoned my own plan and followed on from Eireann's addition instead. Other times, she would complete a section, only to discover a few days later that I had inserted an entire page or more of text that she liked enough to keep. I know she improved my writing, especially when it came to dialog. I'd save a conversation thinking it felt sterile and lifeless and come back the next day to find it vibrant and alive, often with the exact same dialog, but with the addition of actions and descriptive writing that brought it to life. I may be flattering myself to think that I improved Eireann's writing, but I know I gave her some ideas, and boy, did she run with them!  
> You will find spelling inconsistencies. Malcolm is British, so his chapters follow British orthography. Trip and the other characters are written with American accents, because that is what they seem to have, and their parts follow American orthography. You will find inconsistencies in Trip's accent, and they might not be quite what you'd expect. For example, his diction actually becomes more precise and his accent less pronounced when he is angry or under stress. A comment from Eireann about dropping the –g from words that ended with –ing led me to hours of research on both the variations of the authentic Southern accent and the accent used by Connor Trinneer as Trip Tucker. I watched several Trip-heavy episodes, including "Unexpected," "Dawn," and "Shuttlepod One," and discovered four 'rules' to his accent, which I have tried to follow in his scenes.  
> I am proud of the work Eireann and I have done together and grateful that she has allowed me to play with the brilliant story she initially wrote as a gift for me. I hope you enjoy reading this revised and expanded version as much as we have enjoyed writing it together.
> 
> ~ Mandassina
> 
>  
> 
> It has been one of the most enjoyable writing experiences of my life to collaborate with Mandassina in this series.  
> Over the past couple of months it’s been a pleasure to see a number of excellent new authors find their way into the Enterprise fandom, and Mandassina was one of the ones whose work really stood out for me. It was a bit of a surprise when she mentioned additional chapters that could be added to A World for Dreams, but I was more than happy to work with her on the revised edition, and it has certainly followed that the new story is infinitely richer than the old, at least in my opinion – and has, moreover, left the door open for the sequel, on which we are currently working.  
> This was my first collaborative work, and I had no idea what a joy, a fascination and a challenge it would be to work with such a talented writer. Mandassina has been a treasure to work with, and I look forward to continuing the labour of love during 2018.  
> I hope that readers get as much pleasure from reading this story as we did from writing it.
> 
> ~ Eireann

 

“Understood.  Tucker out.”

I close the comm. link and sit completely still at my desk for a minute.  When I look down at my hands they’re shaking just a little, and I reach out and pick up a hyperspanner to give them something solid to hold on to.

Here in the Empire, life’s always been what you’d call uncertain.  Especially at the top, because the higher you go, the more desperate the people below you are to make you fall so they can take your place.  You’d think someone would have realized by now that this just puts them square in the position you were when they put a knife in your back, but the sorry game just goes on and on, at least till the pause when someone stronger than most gets into power, and then we all have a little breathing space till the next round.

Right now we’re in one of those breathing spaces. It’s actually lasted a while, so that people are starting to get comfortable with it (never a good sign).  Empress Sato’s image is everywhere, and mostly people accept her rule because she’s clever enough to keep her ruthlessness undercover except when it’s necessary to give a little demonstration of the iron fist in the hand-embroidered Triaxian silk glove.  Strength is respected, though, and most think a demonstration of what happens to people who try to disrupt the peace of the Empire is only what the perpetrator deserves. 

And in case anyone thought that the Empress might lack support, they’ve only got to look at the two guys who stand at either side of her at official functions, not to mention the woman who stands a pace or so behind either one of them.  They’re not called the Triad for nothing, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that they give me the shudders.

Reed:Hayes:Gomez.  Though these days you don’t hear _Hayes_ much.  They refer to him as _Alpha_ instead, a nickname that presumably Hoshi tolerates – though sometimes I wonder if she has any option.  For all that the three of them defer to her as the Empress on camera, I’m all too familiar with the sly gleam in the eye of that little English bastard who used to serve aboard _Enterprise_ in the bad old days.  He was loyal to that scumbag Archer in his own way then I suppose, though I never understood _why_ , but personally I wouldn’t give a plug nickel for the chances of anyone who had to depend on his loyalty now.

Gomez used to be his sidekick on _Enterprise_ , so it’s probably no surprise that when he rose, she rose with him.  Not sure which of them I’d distrust the most, though as far as I know she never actively tried to do me any harm – which her boss definitely did, and it's no thanks to him that I’m still here to tell the tale.

Nobody seems to know where Alpha came from, not that it’s safe to speculate anyway.  He’s a MACO, so presumably he came up from the ranks somewhere, but there’s something about him that makes my skin crawl.  He’s not bad-looking and he’s very polite when he speaks to you, but believe me, you can _hear_ the threat.  The day he gave me command of Jupiter Station I came out from the interview and spent the next two hours trying to convince myself I hadn’t _really_ been talking to something pretending to be human.

And those eyes – bright blue.  Almost metallic, like shiny blue coins, they're all iris, no pupil, but as creepy as they are, I can't say for sure that they're what made him seem so…inhuman.  Got to be fake lenses, of course, but ... Jeez.

I swallow, and set down the hyperspanner.

When you’ve got shuttles with impulse drive, Jupiter Station’s really not that far away from Earth.  But it’s far enough away for the Triad to leave me alone, at least as long as I continue to report that things are rolling along and as long as the ships they send me for repair continue to leave in A1 battle-order.  They’ve got other things to think about, and it’s always seemed they weren’t going to waste their energies fixing what’s not broken.

A few days ago, however, I got the notice that one of them was coming to check the place out for himself.

Reed.  Of course, it _had_ to be Reed.  At a guess, he volunteered for the job.  He won’t have forgotten our little history any more than I have, and though now he has more than enough power to order me put against a wall and shot out of hand, he undoubtedly knows that the station runs a heck of a lot better with me in charge than it ever did for anyone else.  The war may be going better than it has for years, but it still relies on a fast turnover on its ship repairs, and for just as long as I can provide that and manage not to give him enough provocation to make him forget it, I guess I’m safe enough.  It did make me cuss some at the thought of having to bow and scrape to the little asshole, but hell, he’d only be here for a couple days and then he’d slither back to the other two snakes and I’d get his quarters disinfected and forget about him again.

And now this.

I run my hand across my mouth, which is suddenly dry with nerves.

‘This’ is probably one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever done in my life.  Hell, cancel that: ‘this’ is _the_ most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in my life.

I glance at the clock on my monitor.  Fuck, they don’t give me much time to arrange things, do they?

The communicator on my desk chirps.  “ _Sirius_ and her escort ships are on an approach vector, Boss,” says Lieutenant Eloise Chastain, my PA.  She sounds almost sympathetic, because it’s obvious that the next few days aren’t going to be a walk in the park.

Hell, she doesn’t know the _half_ of it.


	2. 01: Arrival (General Malcolm Reed)

Ah.  Here we are at last: the Jupiter yards.

  Last time I was here it was a right mess, filled with quarter-finished ships swarmed over by half-arsed repair and construction teams who got in each other’s way more than they co-operated to achieve anything.   Today – it must be said, even if I certainly don’t say it aloud – it looks good.  Damned good.

 _Worryingly_ damned good, in fact.

  We had been kept informed that excellent progress was being made.  We naturally discounted at least half of the praise the narrator lavished on the project; humans are such romanticisers.  But even with this elimination, when we sat down to review the end-of-year reports it surprised both of us that so much could have been done in so short a time.

 With the war still very much in the balance, it seemed only wise for one of us to carry out a personal inspection.  After all, although we trust our own, there are only two people whose judgment we trust implicitly.

  Each other.

  I lean against the viewing port, studying the station, and yes – I’m impressed.  Seriously impressed, and more bothered than I care to admit.

  Naturally I’m more than pleased by the progress, but control and organisation on this scale indicates the presence of power.  And power is not something we encourage in the Empire.  Except our own, of course.

  I don’t say anything.  Silence is one of my deadliest weapons.  I just look, and keep my counsel.

=/\=

  It was brought to my attention a while ago that the captain of the _Sirius_ had recently described me (at a private function) as a ‘delicious little asshole’.  On my coming on board I showed my appreciation of this description; first I nailed her on the bed, and then after testing the ship’s Agony Booth on her to the maximum I nailed what was left of her to the wall at the back of the Bridge.  I’ve always believed in posting reminders of the respect due to your betters.

  (Alpha thought my reprisal was ‘piquant’.  I’m so glad we share the same sense of humour.)

  So I’ve a sort of fondness for the _Sirius_ , and it made me happy to promote Em to the newly-vacant captain’s chair for the duration of the voyage.  It wasn’t as if she was likely to need to do any captaining (she’s got a SiC to do that sort of thing if it needs doing), what with three fairly handy-looking warships as escort.  She could just sit in the chair and look deliciously fuckable, a feat which she manages to achieve almost without trying even when she’s not in my quarters wearing skimpy lace undies and a ‘Come on, if you think you’re hard enough’ expression.  As a matter of fact she was so delighted by this arrangement that on the first day I accepted her kind offer of borrowing the aforementioned chair for an extraordinarily pleasurable twenty minutes while she knelt happily in front of me and demonstrated her gratitude for favours received, to which the previous occupant’s sound-effects made an intermittent background.

  This sort of introduction to the new command structure always produces a gratifying degree of efficiency in the lower orders of the hierarchy.  As I stroll onto the Bridge now, it’s quite remarkable how everyone present straightens up and becomes even more assiduously busy than they’ve been beforehand.  Em, of course, is cheerfully practising her knife throwing, though she has the grace to look slightly sheepish when I catch her at it.  After all, the captain’s chair is generally supposed to face forward, just in case, and really the body’s starting to look a bit ... well ... _punctured_ , as well as not smelling all that nice by this time.  But I’m prepared to cut her a little slack in the circumstances, though I make a note to order somebody to clear the mess up before I get back.  It’s just not _tidy._

  So.  As Em rises out of respect for her commanding officer, I nod to her to resume her seat.  She swings it around and we both contemplate the view-screen, though I won’t deny that some of my attention wanders occasionally in the direction of her splendid cleavage, which is now directly below and in front of me.  She really has the most magnificent....

  Ahem.  The shipyards.  Yes.

  Tucker was Forrest’s protégé.  Archer tolerated him, mostly because he hadn’t got anyone better and Tucker knew how to talk himself into appearing indispensable.  Forrest, though, had a real belief in the misshapen oaf’s talents – it was he who put him in charge of _Enterprise_ , giving him a delusion of his own importance in the scheme of things.

  Psha.  I’ve heard the odd whisper that there were those who saw him as some kind of White Knight, some would-be hero who’d have rid the world of me if he’d only had the chance.  Me!  Personally I never bought that (he’d have been dead long ago if I had) – he was one of life’s sullen little haters, mostly content to loathe from a distance.  I wonder how he enjoyed watching the transmissions as Alpha and I took our places at either side of the Empress’s throne.  If he thought her having her arse on the velvet was any sign of her having power over us, though, he was even more delusional than I’d imagined.  Sato’s our figurehead now, our pawn.  People are used to her, and she gets most of the blame for the Empire’s little faults; and besides, if anyone gets around to arranging a successful assassination (unlikely, but never say ‘never’), it’s most likely Hoshi who’ll be the target.  We don’t mind not being centre stage, and after all, it keeps her amused and out of trouble.  We even fuck her occasionally, when we’re not fucking each other.

  (Mayweather... now I have to admit, he was fun.  While he lasted, of course.  A lot of fun.  I always knew he had stamina.)

  Tucker as a hero, though!  I laugh silently at the thought.  There are security tapes from half a dozen not-so-discreet ‘establishments’ that could give the lie to that.  Has some unusual tastes, does Charles Tucker III.  I wonder how T’Pol fares o’nights, sharing his quarters, and whether she really knew what she was letting herself in for when she opted to accept him as her protector (insofar as she had the choice, which she didn’t, much).  Considering that Vulcans are notoriously strait-laced in other ways, I hope she enjoys variety in the bedroom.

  She could have surrendered herself to my tender mercies instead.  But there again, maybe not.

 _Sirius_ slows slightly to allow _Dreadnaught_ to approach the yards’ command centre first.  _Invictus_ glides into position, every weapon trained at a different part of the structure.  One blink from _Dreadnaught_ to show her scanners indicate the presence of a threat in there, and the whole centre will disappear in a fiery inferno.  _Conqueror_ remains beside us, ever vigilant.  I’m so touched Alpha assigned her to me.  He’s an absolute softie, when you get to know him.... well, that’s the sort of thing people usually say about the strong silent type, though I’m not sure he’d thank me for applying it to him, even if it was accurate.

  A wash of memory assails me: the morning I left him back on Earth.  His immaculate white bedding, and his beautiful body naked in it.  The morning sunshine slanting through the window making his blue eyes more luminous than ever as we made love.  He bit my shoulder blades, making me shudder with lust.

 _Dreadnaught_ reports in.  “All clear, _Sirius._ ”

  “Acknowledged.”  Em looks up at me.  “Your escort’s waiting, sir.”

  “Accompany me to the shuttlebay, Captain.”

  “Sir.”

  She knows perfectly well why, of course.  The turbo-lift doors are hardly shut before she slaps a hand on the emergency stop panel and unzips her uniform jacket.

  Being captain, she can excuse herself from wearing the regulation undershirt.  Being familiar with my little ways, she has taken this precaution.  I can only applaud her foresight.  Happily she also elected to dispense with a bra as well, and so the parting of the two sides of the overburdened jacket is a sight guaranteed to bring instant life to any male organ still attached to the parent groin.

  I render due appreciation during the very few moments it takes for her deft hands to remove any other barriers to our mutual satisfaction.  Very shortly after that both of her long legs are wrapped around my hips and the lift cabin is juddering to the impacts.

  We’re both restored to respectability when the turbo-lift finally arrives at H Deck, though the MACO guard of honour there probably appreciate the fact that her face is becomingly flushed and her re-confined bosom is still heaving like a stormy sea.  An attractive woman, is Em, and no doubt when she comes off shift and goes on the prowl there will be few cabins where she won’t receive an enthusiastic welcome that’s rather more than dutiful.  I’d take her with me, but she and Tucker never got on and this is supposed to be a fact-finding mission rather than a bear-baiting.  Not that I’m claiming he and I ever got on either, but I’m probably a bit more subtle than Em; I can slip a needle under a nail where she’d have the fingers torn off.  And little as I like the man in the general way, I’m a realist, and Tucker’s fingers are useful where they are.  On principle, I prefer to leave particularly skilled digits attached if at all possible.

  She escorts us to the shuttlebay, and waits while the standard checks are performed.  As soon as my transport is declared safe and ready to fly, I step on board.

  I don’t know why I turn around and look at her.  It’s not something I’d normally do, and with my desire temporarily sated it’s not as if I find her any more than aesthetically pleasing.  But she’s there, and I don’t know, she’s...

_Getting soft in your old age, aren’t you?_

  She sees me looking and snaps off a salute.  She’s so rigid now you’d never believe that less than ten minutes ago she was a series of liquid, writhing curves in my grip.  I acknowledge the salute with a brief nod, and then the shuttle door closes, cutting her off from my sight.

  In the aftermath of sex I feel relaxed.  I make my way to the seat from which I can watch the pilot and weapons officer; not that I suspect them of any lack of efficiency, but I like to keep an eye on things anyway.  It keeps people on their toes, which is where I like them to be, and I’m perfectly happy to suspend them by their wrists to get them there, if that’s what it takes.

  The shuttlepod drops away from _Sirius_ ’s underbelly and curves smoothly towards the control centre’s landing pad.  As we approach, I break into the station’s security feed with the shuttle’s sophisticated spy systems and skim rapidly over the images.  Only one makes me pause briefly: a naked figure lying on a rumpled bed.  It’s T’Pol.  Her hair’s loose and tangled, and as she shifts I bring the image in closer.  Evidently Tucker hasn’t lost his appetite for her, though there again I don’t suppose he spends much time admiring her face.  So much for the White Knight....

  Her body’s as magnificent as ever, but her face ... even I feel a faint shudder run through me, seeing how the once smouldering intelligence in it has been washed away into a kind of blank despair.  She was an officer, she had responsibilities, work to do that kept her brain functioning.  Now she’s reduced to the intellectual challenge of servicing her protector’s sexual needs.

  Though as I restore the feed to standard, I see something that makes me pause momentarily.  For all that the evidence is clear that she’s very much subservient to him, there are a couple of touches I didn’t expect to see.  On the desk there are two meal trays and two chairs facing each other – an image of charming domesticity if I didn’t know better, and as if half of the charming couple wasn’t effectively a sex toy with a pulse.  More: I know of old that for all that Tucker’s computer files are as utterly well-organised as though filed by a machine, his personal space was never tidy.  Now, however, the cabin is surprisingly neat and clean.

  Well, well.  Tucker’s taming the fuck-object in more ways than one, eh?  Perhaps he’s not the one-trick pony I always thought him.  She spreads her legs for him at night and cleans his quarters by day.  How charmingly wifely.

  A wedge of the pad’s domed cover opens to admit us, and as the shuttle lands as lightly as a butterfly on the grating it closes again overhead.  The external O2 readings begin rising as air is pumped in.  The figures spool quickly, even quicker than they used to on _Enterprise_ , and I wonder if it's just the fact that a larger facility allows for more powerful ventilation equipment or if, perhaps, this is another dividend paid out from the _Defiant_. Whatever the case, this site doesn’t waste time, and reluctantly I chalk up another plus for Tucker’s improvements.

  Green lights come on above the door, including the one that says the external atmosphere contains no unexpectedly unfriendly substances; considering how easy it would be to introduce an airborne toxin into the shuttlebay by way of an extra greeting, I prefer not to take chances.  It’s safe for us to leave.

  One of the escort pushes the lever to open the hatch, which slides smoothly to one side with a pneumatic hiss as the seals disengage.

  Several people are stepping down from the control booth.  One of them is instantly recognisable; with his new-found status (and presumably wealth), Tucker’s had some reconstructive surgery to the side of his face, but it’s not really enough to hide the damage.  He probably still fucks with the light off, unless it’s T’Pol, whose opinion of his looks is completely irrelevant.  At a guess, the other two, Hess and Rostov if I recall correctly, are his deputies – he’ll be quite aware that it’s diplomatic to put on some kind of a welcoming committee for me.  I remind myself, though, that here is the centre of that power that can make such revolutionary changes to a massive station.  It may pay us to keep a far closer eye than we have done up till now on our Commander Tucker.

  In the meantime, however, he has to exercise his always acute talent for self-preservation, and accord me the appropriate respect.

  Lord, how he must be hating every minute of it... it’s all I can do not to laugh.

 

 

 


	3. 02: Reception (General Malcolm Reed)

My escort leave the shuttlepod first.  As a matter of course they run scanners around the landing-pad, and then they line up as the honour guard they are as I step out onto the grating.

  The control booth door opens again and someone else steps out whom I recognise instantly, and it’s not a pleasure.  I haven’t seen Phlox for quite some time, and I damn well haven’t missed the experience either.  I’ve no idea what he’s doing here, though at a guess he’s been borrowing technical experts from Tucker’s staff for some new project or other.  I don’t know and I don’t care, frankly I’d have spaced him long before now if Alpha hadn’t had some vague idea that he might be ‘useful’.  Slimy Denobulan bastard.

  He’s late. He hurries to catch up with the welcoming detail, and for some reason his expression catches my attention.  It’s fawning of course – hell, I think the bastard grovels in his sleep – but there’s something, some quickly-hidden flicker of interest in my direction, which sets a faint but deep-seated note of alarm sounding.

  He knows which side his bread’s buttered on, does Phlox.  Knows to a millimetre what he can get away with.  The fright he had with Archer taught him the discretion of survival; he so nearly backed the wrong horse that day.  So why the fuck is he looking at me like – yes, like I’m a candidate for one of his bloody vivisection projects?  I’ll teach him to look at me.  One word from me and he’ll be looking back at his own face, though with the optic nerves ripped in two he won’t have much of a view.

  Resolving that if there’s one peep out of him I’ll arrange that _plus_ a few additional refinements, I transfer my gaze to Tucker.  My sudden visceral unease settles a little at sight of his customary scowl.  He’s another one who’s pushing his luck – thinks he’s too important to be dispensable.  Well, that might have been true while he was tied up reverse-engineering _Defiant_ , but we’ve got the complete schematic now.  He’s good, true; reluctantly I have to admit that he’s bloody brilliant, scarred face and all, and the status of this station is ample testament to just _how_ brilliant; but in a power-hungry Empire there are always clever little weasels pushing their way upward on the faces of their fellows.  Back on Earth, Kelby fawns and schemes and tells anyone who’ll listen that Tucker’s a has-been, a fluke, a man who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.  He may be right and he may be wrong, but in ways such as these the balance of power shifts in the Empire. Personally I think Kelby’s a bitter little shit who’s utterly outclassed, but though he’ll get nowhere with me and I’m the one who ultimately decides who gets to be in charge of this station, he’s persistent, I’ll give him that.  If he drips enough poison in the right ears, who knows?  There are others, lower in the hierarchy, who have positions for engineers, and after all no-one’s proof against accidents, however accomplished they may be.  Kelby’s day may come yet....

  Still.  The fact that that day hasn’t yet dawned no doubt gives Tucker the bravado to neglect the welcoming smile.  Not that I’d have believed in it if he’d produced it, nor that it’s a thing of beauty when he does smile, with the scarring dragging the muscles awry, but I suppose both of us are past the pretence of that sort of thing.  He renders me due respect – his salute is precision itself.  And after all, that’s what matters.  I have power and he knows it.  He doesn’t have to like me.

  “I have the figures ready for your inspection, sir,” he says, his voice just – just! – on the right side of irony.  “I thought you’d prefer to take some refreshment while you look over them.  The staff on board _Sirius_ transmitted your exact preferences.”

  Well, now, that’s very thoughtful.  The chef on board my flagship is a genius.  He did have some delusions when he came on board about the necessity to serve up gourmet meals that took longer to describe than to cook, but I soon educated his palate.  (Or was it a her?  I know the name began with an A.  Alice or something.  Whatever.)  He knows _now_ how to cook fish and chips properly.  Presumably he feels some professional compassion for the cooks on the station, who might struggle to perform at optimum with one or more fingers removed.  I’m not bothered about _them_ keeping the full set; one finger and an opposable thumb is enough to hold a spoon.

  “I’m not particularly hungry at the moment, Commander, but some tea would be nice.  I’d appreciate it if you could have your staff standing by.  I may have questions for them in due course.”

  “There’s nothin' goes on in this station that I can’t inform you on, sir,” he replies flatly, falling back to allow me to walk towards the exit door.  “If there’s anything worth knowin', I make it my business to know it.”

  The fact that he’s insubordinate enough to question my orders is so startling that I turn my head to glance at him.  Admittedly they weren’t specifically phrased as orders, but any fool with a brain between his ears would recognise that’s exactly what they were.  And Tucker – whatever else he may be – is no fool.  His one lapse, into lovelorn idiocy with a hormonal Vulcan, was his last.

  The turn of my head is exactly what he’s counting on.  For one fleeting second it takes Phlox out of my peripheral vision, and that second is all that’s required.

  He’s not close enough to me to use a hypospray.  He brings up his hand holding some kind of tiny device that spits out a dart, directly at me.  At this range, even he can’t miss.

  At a guess, he was aiming for the muscles in my upper thigh.  Unluckily for him, it hits me between the bones of my left hand, and even as I’m incredulously absorbing the fact that _Phlox_ has found the nerve to stick a pin in me, my right hand is stiffening into the blade that will break his neck like a twig.

  It never connects.  Even as I’m whirling to strike, the co-ordination in my body breaks down.  The step back that ordinarily wouldn’t save him means that rather than striking the base of his neck I flail past it.  The tips of my fingers brush his chest (that’s how close he is to death), but I can’t stop, I can’t control the weight of my body following through, and I crash to the floor.

  My escort have specific instructions.  It doesn’t matter that for some fucking reason my limbs are like things that no longer belong to me in any meaningful sense, that my tongue won’t work, my jaw won’t move.  The MACOs are my honour guard, hand-picked by Alpha himself; they have orders to kill everyone in the room if anything happens to me – except the would-be assassin, who won’t get off nearly that lightly.  At least my ears and eyes still work, and the fact that my lungs are still functioning and my brain is clear suggests that whatever the dart delivered, at least it’s not poison.  Once Tucker and the others are dead, it shouldn’t take too long to extract the antidote from Phlox – what the _fuck_ gave him the idea he could get away with a stunt like this? – and then he and I are going to have a very, very, _very_ long chat.  Which he will enjoy a quite extraordinary amount less than I will.  As a matter of fact I’ll have it televised.  That should top the viewing figures for sure.

  I’m not normally slow on the uptake.  I wouldn’t have got where I am if I hadn’t had the gift for sizing up a situation almost quicker than I can blink.  But I’ve blinked several times – albeit slowly and with difficulty – before I realise that there are no guns firing.  There’s just a silence that I find more absolute than deafness.

  After a moment or two, there’s movement.  But not the splintering, explosive movement of men trying to evade the righteous wrath of six highly-trained and very well-armed killers.  It’s a single movement, precisely aimed.

  My nervous system may have stopped transmitting my orders to my muscles, but it’s still functioning perfectly as regards transmitting pain.  Tucker’s boot slams into my ribs, and I suspect at least two of them break.

  “Sir!” One of the MACOs raps the words out.  “The prisoner is not to be damaged.  Those are our orders.  We will protect him with force.  Deadly force if necessary.”

  ‘The _prisoner_ ’?

  A quavering voice comes over the internal speakers.  “Inbound shuttle.”  Whether it's the anxiety of the speaker or a quality of the PA system is difficult to tell, but I should think if it was the tannoy, the Empire's chief engineer would have fixed the warble by now.

  Well, this isn’t the place for any of us to be when that entry port opens, not unless we particularly _want_ to be sucked out into hard vacuum.  I feel myself being picked up and carried, and realise that we’re going into the control booth.  There’s evidently nowhere there that I can conveniently be placed, so I’m dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes, with only the minimum care taken that nothing breaks.  It doesn’t do my damaged ribs a lot of good, but I manage to muffle the small sound that I can’t quite prevent from escaping.

  My mind is racing.  I’ve nothing to look at bar booted feet, and nothing to listen to but the faint mechanical sounds of the dome admitting another shuttlepod, so I turn my attention to working out who’s responsible for this stunning turn of events.  Sato ... it has to be Sato.  I’d never have thought she’d have the brain to organise something this daring, not after she lost Mayweather to give her sound advice, but she’s as cunning as a fox, and can be brave and ruthless if she thinks she’ll win.  Maybe having her arse on the velvet wasn’t enough for her after all.  Little bitch.  If I get out of this alive she’ll join Phlox on the television.  I’ll invent something for her so enthralling it’ll be worth putting out on pay-per-view.... I’d imagine the revenue from watching an Empress meeting with an extremely long-drawn-out end at the hands of a MACO death squad would fund another couple of warships.

 _Alpha._   She must have organised some kind of ambush for him too; I wonder with anguish whether he’s still alive, or whether he had the chance to react and died resisting.  And what about Em?  She couldn’t be left free, she has power in her own right and she’d move heaven and earth to rescue us. And besides, the Empress probably has additional scores to settle with Em; there were nights when a threesome turned into a foursome, and if I can remember whose little idea that was, I’m sure Hoshi can too.

 _Never divide your forces_ is an old and wise military adage, but what the fuck, _here?_ Right in the Sol system?  We’d done such a careful job of consolidating our power, of getting the influential people on our side.  I’d have sworn – I’d have bet my last credit on it – that if there was going to be a rebellion it wouldn’t start here.  Even Tucker wouldn’t be fool enough to think he’d get a better deal from Sato than he has from us.  On board _Enterprise_ she hardly noticed he existed; people were what interested her, not engines – except insofar as they drove the starships that are the tools of power.

  The door to the landing pad finally reopens.  I hear footfalls, but I can’t turn my head.  I simply stare into nothing, savagely waiting for information, for _anything_ that will give me a pointer to where I start fighting back.

  No-one speaks.  Presumably someone makes a gesture, though, because suddenly I’m being lifted again.

  It may be coincidental that the bodies of the MACOs who are carrying me block my view of whoever it is who’s arrived.  Sato must be getting subtle in her old age.  Normally she’d take the greatest pleasure in grinding the stiletto heel of her ‘victory’ into the face of her conquests.  Still, no doubt that pleasure is merely being reserved for later.  Frankly I don’t give a shit.  She can gloat as much as she likes, it won’t worry me.  There’ll just be a few more notches on the tally-stick to be redeemed in full when the tables finally turn again.

  It’s a surprise to nobody that there’s a gurney in the corridor outside.  Thus Phlox’s attendance.  He supervises my disposal on it with scant regard for my dignity, and makes no attempt to hide his outsize grin of delight.  Idly I recreate it in my mind’s eye with his tongue torn out to the roots and dangling down through a rent in the underside of his jaw.  It can be arranged, and will, if I have anything to say in the matter.

  I’m pushed down corridors.  They’re like corridors everywhere, bleak, sterile, bland.  My vision seems unable to focus long enough to read anything as I’m propelled quickly to some unknown destination, but it’s probably only about three or four minutes before twin doors hiss back and I’m pushed into a room.

  The fear that has lain coiled in the pit of my stomach suddenly springs to life, gripping me by the throat.  It’s an operating theatre.

_Vivisection...._

  I won’t scream _(Yes you will,_ whispers the fear, _they all scream in the end...)_

  I won’t beg _(Not that you have a voice anyway,_ whispers the fear, _they’ve taken that away...)_

  I won’t give in without a fight _(But you’re paralysed, helpless,_ whispers the fear, and now it sniggers audibly _.  He can spread you like a starfish and gut you with a filleting knife, and there’s fuck-all you can do about it...)_

  I want to think that it’s sheer rage that finally ratchets up the speed of my even breathing.  A lot of it is, but I’ve never hidden from the truth, and the truth is now that I’m sick with horror and fear.  Death comes for us all, and for as long as I can remember there was always the possibility that mine would be messy and painful. It’s something I’ve lived with long enough to stare the reality of it in the face without flinching, but my whole being cringes away from it being like this – pinioned and helpless, dying by inches, with that grinning bastard’s fingers delving around in my guts till finally my body can’t take it any more and my heart stops once too often....

  They lay me out on the butcher’s slab, stripping me with emotionless efficiency before spread-eagling me into the quite superfluous restraints.  I stare at the ceiling (not that I’ve any option) while I listen to Phlox prepping.

  He finally steps over to me and I exert all the control I have over my body and will not to release a single breath he could mistake for a whimper.  But to my perplexity, instead of waving an artistic scalpel while he decides precisely where to start carving, he simply stands beside the bed, waiting.

  Ah.  An audience is expected.  Sato, no doubt.  I wonder how long it’ll take her to get bored.  Probably not very, once I can’t stay quiet any more.

  Whatever I’ve been dosed with, it’s good enough to stop my mouth moving to any significant degree.  It would have afforded me some minor satisfaction to have instructed Phlox on what will happen to his wives and offspring once news of my demise gets out ( _Don’t get mad, get even_ has always been one of my favourite maxims), but he’ll just have to find out via the newscasts like everyone else.  Still.  It’s nice to think he’ll be taken by surprise just like I was.

  I hear the door open.  Phlox dips his head, carefully submissive.  “Ma’am.”

  Footsteps cross the theatre.  There’s a slight pause, presumably while Sato dons sterile protective clothing.  After all, we wouldn’t want to get nasty red stains on that priceless Triaxian silk she likes to wear, would we?

  Then, finally, she steps up beside the bed and into my field of vision.

  It’s not Sato.

  It’s Em.

  For about half a second I enjoy the wonderful delusion that the cavalry has arrived in the nick of time.  I envision which of the array of scalpels will be the first to land in Denobulan flesh.  Not that she’ll kill him quickly for this, oh no, she’ll just let him a little blood and scare him shitless.  He’ll have the antidote to hand, nothing surer, and she’ll get it out of him before you could say ‘crushed genitals’.  Then, when I’m free and moving again, the retribution will begin.  The very _protracted_ and _painful_ retribution.

  It’s a nice half a second.  I just wish it had lasted a bit longer, but as I said, I’m a realist.  I recognise that blank stare down at me.  I should do; I’m a master at it.

  This is not a rescue.

  “Everything went to plan, Ma’am?” Phlox asks politely.  “There’s plenty available?”

  Her eyes are fathomless.  “Of course.  I harvested it at once.”  She passes over an insulated vial.  “You’re sure this will work?”

  He nods eagerly.  “I’ve done a number of trials.  The success rate increases exponentially when we can introduce the host’s DNA at the same time.  Even just a small amount neutralises the defence mechanisms.”

  “Good.” She looks down at me again, and pauses.  “Put him out.”

  “Unconscious?” He seems puzzled and, I suspect, disappointed.  “I assure you it’s not necessary...”

  Her eyes rise from me to him.  He continues, with hardly a break, “...But on the other hand, it may well reduce the physiological trauma and improve the recovery time.  After all, we want him to heal quickly afterwards, hmm?”

  “ _Exactamente_.”

  He moves to fetch something else – presumably the knockout stuff.  For what seems like a long time, Em and I look at each other.  It comes to me that I wish that she was the last thing I’d ever see, but that’s not going to happen.  There’s going to be light at the other side of the darkness, and I’m not going to want to wake to see it.  But then again, nobody around here cares what I think.  I’m just something that has to recover quickly afterwards, and then.... what?

  The hypospray hisses against my neck.  I struggle to make my lips move as the world starts to fade out; it’s probably just naïveté on my part, but I’m not altogether convinced she gave the order because she was bothered about the physiological trauma. 

  We go back a long way, Em and I. 

  There again, maybe I read too much about that other _Enterprise_ in the _Defiant_ ’s database.  Talk about delusions of kindness.

  “Em...” I’m not sure if I even manage a whisper before the darkness swallows me.


	4. 03: Reward (Commander Charles Tucker)

_He’s down!_

  I see him on the gurney and I still can't believe it.  The vicious little bastard always seemed so in control, so ... so damned invincible.  He was bad enough aboard _Enterprise_ till he fell for that Gorn’s trick – there were times when I think he even gave Archer the creeps.  As for me, I could feel it every time he prowled into Engineering, even before I laid eyes on him; that prickle between your shoulder blades that tells you someone’s got a phase pistol drawing a bead there.  And I haven't forgotten the day he finally got an excuse to shut me into that fucking Agony Booth that he and Phlox dreamed up ... I can still see that wicked little gleam in his eye as he turned up the gain.  He was loving every second of it, probably trying to see if he _could_ kill me with it.

  Twisted little fucker.

  After he paired up with that Alpha guy I honestly thought he had it made.  On the feeds you could tell they were lovers; Reed’s always been bi, but there was this fluidity, this almost symbiosis somehow ...  It was like watching mating snakes.  In more ways than one.

  As for what Em was to the two of them, well, we won’t go there, except to say she always looked like a cat on a sun-porch swing.  Not that a cat on a sun-porch swing is any less a cat; nice little tweety-bird sets down in pouncing range, and you’ll soon find out what those claws are for.  When she was on board _Enterprise_ she wouldn’t have looked twice at me of course, but a couple of my crewmen lived to tell the tale.  Just about.  I swear even Phlox was surprised by the marks she left on Delaney’s back, and the poor guy was so traumatised I let him off with light duties for the next two days....

  So there it was, and here it is: he’s down.  Down but not out.  I double-, triple- and quadruple-checked the orders when they came through, but even after I was convinced they were legitimate, I wasn't about to do the deed myself.  Phlox is the doc, let him do the drugging, and then if the MACO escort didn't get the memo at least I’d get to die quickly.  As it was, even as fast as the drug worked, Reed the viper was damn near fast enough to get the strike in before he went down.  I think Phlox about shit himself with fright.

  So, our Major Malfunction – or I suppose he's General Chaos, now – went down like a felled tree; but he's still conscious, and even now I feel a little slither of fear down my back as I catch his eyes.  _Murderous_ doesn’t even come close.  If he gets out of this, the bill will be higher than any of us can afford to pay.

  They push the gurney away down the corridor, and I’m left with Em Gomez.  She’s sultrier than ever, and somehow manages to transform the simple act of stepping into my personal space into one that sets my pulse thudding.

  I can’t help but speculate exactly what she used to get up to with those other two.  If Reed thought he was the only one who had access to the security feeds aboard _Enterprise_ , he underestimated me.  I was the Chief Engineer, and a sneaky bastard to boot.  I have hours of footage of Em exercising her libido with whoever happened to take her fancy – him included of course.  If ever she gets tired of being in charge of the Empire, she’ll have a million-credit career waiting for her in the porn industry.

  Her dark Latin eyes are stunning, close up.  They seem to make mortal sin out of sliding my uniform zipper down a few centimeters, and although I know that her fingers are slipping inside just to position the securing pin that’ll stop my reward from skewering me, it’s still as much as I can do to keep my imagination from making so much more of it that as soon as she steps back she’ll put me on report for indecency in front of a superior officer.

  “ _Bien hecho, Comodoro_ ,” she says evenly as she pins the rank pip in place.  It’s what I was promised if I came through, and like a little kid I get a kick out of hearing it.  This means power, acknowledged power rather than the subtle grip I’ve been establishing out of sight of the sun.  They promised; I delivered; I get my reward.  Though seeing Reed crash is almost enough of a reward in itself.  I’m guessing Liz Cutler sure won’t be shedding many briny tears over the bastard’s downfall...

  “Thank you, Ma’am.” I salute as I should, pin-sharp; even being an engineer doesn’t save me from being expected to do the honors correctly to a superior officer.  “Will there be anything else?”

  “ _Nada, gracias._ ” Her gaze runs down me, as slow as molasses, and I know instinctively that my face wouldn’t be any object if she were in the mood to crook her finger.  I have the most bizarre dual reaction: part of me prays she _would_ crook it, but the other part remembers what she’s just had done to a man whose bed she’s shared regularly over the years, and who presumably had some sort of feeling for her.  Being as the man in question is Malcolm Reed I wouldn’t guess exactly what that feeling was, but I’d bet my bottom dollar it wasn’t ‘indifference’.

  I get lucky, or maybe unlucky.  She has other fish to fry, and so with a sultry sidelong glance that suggests the finger-crooking may simply have been postponed for another day, she strolls off down the corridor after the gurney.  Without making it too obvious, I turn my head to watch her.  She has the most glorious undulating walk, effortless because she places one foot almost in front of the other, like she’s walking a tightrope.  Maybe she is, but hell, it sure makes for a view to die for from behind.


	5. 04: Prognosis (General Malcolm Reed)

  I break back into the light, choking for air.

  It’s there for me, hissing through an oxygen mask over my face.  For a moment I’m too busy filling my lungs to think of much else, because that’s what your average body craves more than anything else: breath.

  Thought returns relatively slowly.  Relatively, I say, because within the space of two inhalations I remember exactly what was going on when they switched my world off, and tension wells up in me at the thought of what and who I’m going to see when I open my eyes.

  Medical sensors make it completely pointless to pretend to be unconscious when you’re not.  Gathering as much courage as my hands will hold, I force my slightly sticky lids open.

  Still in sickbay.  Well, that’s not entirely surprising.  And it seems that I once more have the use of my body as opposed to being a powerless resident in it, though the merest flexion of my wrists assures me that nobody has made the mistake of leaving me with the ability to take advantage of this.  If my arms are pinioned then doubtless my legs will be too; I’ve killed before now with a kick in the right place or a knee clamped into a choke-hold around a neck.  Not that this would be a viable option right now anyway, for although I trust my legs are still attached, I can’t feel them.  Hopefully I will be able to verify their presence before too much longer, since having had them removed would be damnably inconvenient.

  Phlox is standing over me, his eyes on the read-outs on the panel over my head.  He looks exceptionally pleased with himself, which makes me more regretful than ever that I’m temporarily unable to rearrange his skeletal structure.

  Em is at my other side.  She’s watching me wake up, and her expression is once again completely opaque.

  I could speak to her now.  Unless they’ve done something to my vocal cords of course, though a cautious, silent swallow suggests nothing’s different there.  But if there’s anything to say I don’t know what it could possibly be.  From this point onwards we both know the other is doing what is necessary, and words would evaporate from that fact like drops of rainwater boiling off superheated duritanium.

  Thankfully she knows this as well as I do.

  Moving with her usual economical grace, she lifts the cover that’s now apparently lying across my belly – presumably more to protect the surgery site than to preserve my maidenly modesty.  Sadly for my now rampant curiosity, a leather band across my forehead prevents me from lifting my head to inspect the damage with her.  All I can see is her expression, which tells me nothing.

  My abdomen is also in the realm of the ‘presumably present’.  There’s a band across my chest, because I can feel the pressure of it as my ribs shift, but from the navel down – nothing.  I’d never have known about that cover if I hadn’t seen Em move it.

  “No problems?” she asks, replacing the sheet carefully.

  Phlox shakes his head, beaming from ear to ear.  “None whatsoever.  It was a complete success.”

  Various unpleasant alternatives present themselves as to ‘what’ could have been a complete success.  The most obvious (to me, anyway) sends a wash of nausea over me that brings perspiration prickling out on my forehead.  _Castrated...._

  “And he will still function?”

  It seems an extraordinarily long time before Phlox answers.

  “Almost certainly.  My test subjects retained full functionality.”  I almost shudder with relief, which may possibly be premature of course; functionality _of what_ was never specified.  “While they survived,” he adds with what seems to me quite unnecessary relish.  “It did take a considerable time to determine the exact combination of hormones to balance matters, and it will probably be advisable to make – ah – _adjustments_ accordingly, when required.” Phlox glances down at me with a look that makes my flesh crawl as he continues smoothly, “And, of course, have his condition monitored throughout.”

  “Of course.” Her voice is bland, though I who know her so well suspect that there’s the smallest ring of a blade in it.  Phlox will be well advised to take the utmost care with Em.

  She lifts the cover again and has another look.  “So how long do you estimate it will be before we may proceed?”

  That ‘we’ gives me pause for thought, even while the doctor hums and haws and talks about my strong constitution versus the necessity for giving ‘Mother Nature’ time to settle down.  Em could be talking about ‘we’ in general terms, as in whatever rebellion she’s leading (not likely, on the whole, but not impossible), or she could be referring to whatever game she and Phlox are playing with me, or she’s in cahoots with A N Other.  Now, who A N Other may be is the question on which the whole outcome of this probably rests.  I’m not in the least saying that Em’s not bright, but she’s no long-term planner.  If she has a plan outlined to her she’ll pick it up like lightning and run with it, and she’s more than capable of improvising should events depart from schedule, but she could no more play chess than I could produce an origami donkey.

  At any rate, it seems that ‘about three weeks’ is the final estimate.  Phlox being Phlox, he produces stipulations and makes demands for this and that ‘to facilitate the healing process’, to all of which Em agrees with a lack of emotion that would make him worry if he knew her as well as I do.  To me, her impassive acquiescence feels far too much like a trap, and he’s walking into it.   It sounds like he’s requisitioning half of the Empire’s medical supplies, and presumably whatever’s going on gives him so much leverage it’s gone to his already weak head.  Em, however, is nobody’s fool.  She’ll pay out all the rope he asks for till the precise second he’s no longer useful, and then she’ll kick the stool out from under him and walk away.

  So.  Three weeks, before ‘something’ can be done with me, or _to_ me, presuming I’ve healed sufficiently.  I find some relief in cursing silently at the thought of waiting twenty-one endless days before finding out what ‘something’ may consist of.  It may even be that I’ll have to wait till then before I find out exactly what’s been done to me already; as agonising as that prospect may be, I have to come to terms with it.  Waiting has never been my strong point, though in the days while I built up my power base I acquired some skill at it.  Now, once again, that patience is to be put to the test.  In the meantime I’ll play nice.  I’ll speak when spoken to (if I ever _am_ spoken to, which is admittedly unlikely), I’ll play the penitent prisoner, I’ll out-grovel Phlox if I have to.  I’ll even smile at Tucker when he comes to visit, as I’m fairly sure he will.  There won’t be a more submissive, sorry prisoner in the Empire than me.

  I can only pin all my belief into the hope that sooner or later, these shackles will come off.

  And then – and _then–!_

_‘I will have such revenges on you both_

_That all the world shall—I will do such things—_

_What they are yet I know not, but they shall be_

_The terrors of the earth.’_

 


	6. 05: Three Weeks (General Malcolm Reed)

  If I ever get to experience eternity, I’ll recognise it immediately.

  Three weeks.

_Three._

_Fucking._

_Weeks._

  Twenty-one days; five hundred and four hours; thirty thousand, two hundred and forty minutes; one million, eight hundred and fourteen thousand, four hundred seconds.  Every one of which I swear I’ve counted off, lying immobile on this bed while around me people came and went, servicing the needs of a body which continued to function.  Not that they actually spoke to me, of course.  They just did the necessary, speaking to each other if needs be but never with a word or a look actually _at_ me.  It didn’t take me long to work out that this was entirely deliberate, and probably for either or both of two reasons: to torture me by effectively isolating me from all communication, or to protect themselves from any attempt I might make to suborn anyone from their loyalty.

  As if I would.

  After the first two weeks they began to reduce the pain meds.  Feeling returned gradually below my waistline.  Enough to reassure me that I still had two legs, and that I hadn’t been wasting the hours I’d spent daily flexing and releasing the muscles to keep them in some kind of condition.  I couldn’t feel them, but I had to believe they were there and that I was achieving something.  After all, I had to have a roughly serviceable pair of legs to stand on when I lunged for a weapon.

  Legs, yes.  Present and correct.  I took what comfort I could from that.  More comforting still was the sensation that presently came slightly further up.  Much as Phlox would undoubtedly have enjoyed removing my kidneys for examination, if my continued existence was a requirement he’d probably have left them in place.  Equipment further down the system was lower down the list of survival necessities, and it was an indescribable relief when I was able to determine that although a catheter was fitted, I seemed to have been left with the full set.  It came as somewhat of a surprise one evening part way through the third week when a nurse set about testing ‘functionality’ among the daily processes.  At first I thought _Fuck you,_ and then baser ideas took over.  Considering neither of us exchanged a word, I’d give her full marks for being quick on the uptake; I’m not sure that what followed was exactly what Phlox had intended (though there again, knowing his particular predilections he was probably watching via the cc feed), but we definitely found out that I still functioned.  Naturally she didn’t make the mistake of loosening any of the restraints, but that didn’t provide any serious bar to our enjoyment, on that or any of the other subsequent nocturnal visits that probably weren’t strictly authorised. There was one unfortunate occasion when an unexpected visit from a lab technician obliged her to make a hasty exit, leaving me to the torments of the damned, but apart from that we had a rather agreeable interlude.  I may even let her live when I get out of here, which is more than I will any of the rest of them.

  I’m still no wiser as to what the surgery consisted of.  Obviously it took place low on my belly, because the flesh there is tender and my angel of mercy had to take care how she arranged herself while we were testing my functionality.  Naturally this required the removal of my catheter for the duration (an unusual item of foreplay it has to be said), but the minor discomfort was worth it.  Now and again when her own functionality started working she got a bit carried away, but although there were a few aches and pains afterwards no serious harm was apparently done.

  Twenty-one days.  Twenty-one days of utter and excruciating boredom, waiting for the axe to fall.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a day dawn with a greater sense of thankfulness.  I may not see another, but at least there’ll be an end of this long-drawn-out agony of waiting.

  “And how is the patient today, hmm?” Enter Phlox, cheerful enough to give you toothache.  Not that he’s talking to me – he wouldn’t waste the oxygen.  Presumably it’s standard bedside protocol as laid down in Doctoring For Dummies, or whatever cursed manual he picked his medicinal know-how out of.  He wisely orders one of his lackeys to double-check the restraints before he approaches the bed; unfortunately for me, those who’ve dealt with me over the past twenty-one days (I think that figure will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life!) have been sedulously careful to unfasten them one at a time while I’m being tended, and to make sure the current one’s fastened again before turning to the next.

  He hums and grins and hums a bit more as he scrolls through the readouts and inspects the surgery site carefully.  When he’s finished he steps to the comm. panel.  “Phlox to Commodore Tucker.”

_–Commodore?–_

_“Tucker here.”_

  “Ah, Commodore, I’m pleased to report that the procedure on the prisoner appears to have been a complete success.  You may wish to pass on the news that he’s ready for use when required.”

  So far I’ve lain meekly on the bed, not even turning my gaze to look at him.  But as the last six words sink in I can’t prevent a single movement that makes the duritanium fastenings of the restraints squeak ever so slightly.

  “And conscious,” adds Phlox, with relish.

_“Wouldn’t have wanted it any different,”_ says Commodore Tucker.  ‘Commodore’, my Aunt Fanny.  I bite my lip to stop the words escaping; they’d achieve nothing except betraying how badly I want to laugh at his rise in the world, and at what a mockery a title can be.  I’ve never denied that he’s an extremely intelligent man and an exceptional engineer, and the way he’s pulled this station together was a startling display of his powers of organisation and staff control, but _Commodore!_   Spare me.  And in a situation where I hold so very few cards, betraying my entirely legitimate amusement would not be a strong survival strategy.

  “So are there any ... orders in place regarding his disposal?”

_“Reckon they’ll want him in their place.  Nobody’s told me any different, anyway.  Get him down there an’ keep him secured.  I don’t want him able to move more’n an eyelash.  You got that?”_

  “Loud and clear, Commodore, loud and clear.  And I’ll be waiting in Sickbay when I’m required.  Phlox out.”

  From the corner of my eye I see the gurney being brought over.  More restraints.  It takes quite heroic self-control not to unleash a burst of vituperation, but I’m thoroughly tamed; I don’t even tense as the first of the lackeys puts a hand to the shackle on my right wrist.  They can’t get me on to that gurney without unfastening all of the straps that hold me to this bed that’s been my prison since I was brought in here....

  “Ah, I believe your parole would _not_ be acceptable, even were you minded to offer it.”  Phlox materialises at my shoulder like a grinning Denobulan leprechaun, and before I can even flinch away the hypospray’s at my neck again.  “And we won’t be taking any unnecessary risks with anyone’s safety on such a momentous occasion.  I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  I understand, all right.  I understand that once again I’m conscious and inert, able to see and hear but neither speak nor act.  I understand that all the restraints are flipped open and I’m utterly unable to move hand or foot, that I’m lifted like a landed salmon and transferred to the gurney.  If anything were wanting to complete the effect of my being served up on a plate, it’s that a soft white throw drapes the gurney like a tablecloth.  I quite expect someone to lay a row of slices of lemon down my chest and position a sprig of parsley somewhere side-splittingly comical.  Perhaps Chef Alice could supply a radish cut up to look like a waterlily or something, he’s probably a deft chap at producing that sort of thing.  It would just be the finishing touch seated artistically in my navel.

  Even now, I suppose it’s a compliment of sorts that the doctor’s hell-brew isn’t thought a sufficient guarantee of my harmlessness.  My lower legs overhang the end of the gurney and are brought down to restraints waiting ready for my ankles.  My wrists are secured at some part of the structure below my waist.  At least they leave my head free, though as I can’t move it anyway that’s not much of a benefit.

  Memory flashes across my brain: Harris, brought into Alpha’s office similarly bound and helpless.  I suppose this is what my deceased mate would have described as _piquant._   But at least we gave him the dignity of dying on his feet.  I’m not pretending it was a nice death; after what he’d done to us, I wouldn’t imagine he expected one.  But if that particular fate’s on the cards for me I can’t imagine why it should have been necessary to perform surgery on me first.

  Though to tell the truth, even if it is I’d prefer that to being condemned to live one more day on that bloody bio-bed.  Some fates really are worse than death.

  So.  I’m finally ‘ready for use’, whatever that involves.  Something extremely soft is draped over my lower parts, and I wish my lungs would oblige me with a hearty guffaw at the mental image of my modesty being preserved by a strategically positioned feather boa.

  A couple of lackeys take up position to wheel me out of the room.  “Goodbye for now!” calls Phlox chirpily, while his oversize Denobulan beam splits his ugly face like an overripe watermelon.

  With care, you can break an individual finger bone in quite a few places.  Over the past twenty-one days I’ve mentally designed machinery that will achieve the separation between fractures in microns.  It’s so ingenious I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.

  I’ll leave it to you to guess who’ll be the first test subject when I finally get it built.

  They wheel me down the corridor and into a turbolift.  By the most incredible coincidence, this is already occupied by ‘Commodore’ Tucker.  Goodness me, how many people are smiling pleasantly at me this morning!

  I must be in for a rare treat.


	7. 06: Ridealong (Commander Charles Tucker)

I don't know what the hell I'm doing here, what possessed me to join Reed for this ride in the turbolift. No one asked for me. Gomez didn't say anything about wanting me to deliver him _personally_. Alpha doesn't talk to me at all, which I don't mind one little bit. As far as they're concerned, my job was finished the moment Major Maladjustment hit the deck in the shuttlebay.

 _Actually, it's General Disarray, now,_ I remind myself automatically. I know he's been promoted right along over the years, and even in his present circumstances, I think it might raise a few eyebrows if I were to slip and refer to him by the wrong rank.

  I feel like I'm delivering a condemned man to the gallows.

  God _damn_ that Cutler!

  I didn't tell her about the plan ahead of time because she's still kind of fragile sometimes and I wasn't sure she'd be able to hold it together knowing he was coming onto the station. Last time I make a mistake like _that!_

  She came to my quarters at the end of shift, and actually _smacked_ me when I opened the door! Not in the face, of course; I think she believes there might still be a chance that I'd break her arm if she ever tried something like that. I can't say for sure I wouldn't. She swatted me on the arm, though, hard enough to hurt! Striking a superior officer! Sad, sorry, shy little Liz Cutler! If she’d tried that on _Enterprise...._

  But our _Enterprise_ is long gone, and Jupiter Station is _my_ command, and I’ve changed some. I let her get away with it this time because we were off duty and this was personal. She doesn't get to hit her boss, nobody under my command does that. But friends are a different story, and it all depends on what your friends will tolerate. Me? I'm a pretty tolerant guy. Besides, that growl from T'Pol when she launched herself off the bed in my defense the moment I yelped _more_ than straightened Liz out. Luckily one barked command from me was enough to stop my Vulcan attack-dog in her tracks, but Liz knew she’d had a narrow escape.

  I still haven't figured that green-blooded bitch out, either. I'm sure she despises me, not that she doesn't have every reason in the world to, but for some reason, I know I can trust her just as much as I do Cutler, Rostov, and Hess. I mean, Vulcans are pretty damned strong, and she could probably kill me if she ever decides I make her life too intolerable. But there has to be more to it than knowing her life wouldn't last much longer than mine once someone found me dead in my quarters. I've never told her she was expected to dust, make the bed, put away my clean clothes when they're delivered from the station's laundry, or tidy up the clutter of PADDs and data disks, beer bottles and snack wrappers, pens, pencils, and notes to myself that inevitably accumulate whenever I spend an evening working in my quarters. And some of those nights, when I really ought to be sleeping but I'm stuck on a knotty problem that ties my guts and my muscles up in knots, she'll creep up behind me and wait until I see her reflection in the monitor. Then, if I nod my permission, she'll undress me to my waist, rub her hands together to warm them, and do some of that Vulcan neuro-pressure on me. When she's done, I'm so relaxed I sometimes need her help to get into bed.

  But the night Major Malice ( _General Chaos_ ) arrived, I had to threaten her with the kennel to get her to go back to her spot on my bed and stop growling and snarling at Liz. Since Cutler showed up before I let her use the toilet, she complied pretty damned quick. As miserable as she might be spending the night in a cage that's neither deep nor wide nor high enough to let her sit, stand, or lay down comfortably, I have to imagine that doing it with a full bladder would be infinitely worse.

  I only had to use the kennel a few times when she was awarded to me as the reward for producing the complete schematics of the _Defiant._ (Well, _almost_ the complete schematics.  I made sure to keep a few choice pieces for myself – let’s call them insurance.)  There were a few things I wanted a little payback for, and I think she’d believed I was so smitten with her charms that I’d forgotten what she did to me to get me locked up in the Agony Booth.  It took a while for her to weigh up the situation, but a few nights in the cage after I’d done whatever I wanted to her soon taught her the reality of life as a failed rebel.

  But right now, Cutler's the one I'm puzzling about…

_Liz looked from T'Pol to me a couple of times, and I could tell she thought I was a bastard. Then, she very deliberately turned her back on my Vulcan (in the circumstances, maybe not the wisest thing to do if my pet weren't so well-trained) and proceeded to tear a strip off me a mile wide._

_"How_ ** _could_** _you, Commander?" she demanded._

_I wasn't about to point out my new rank pip at that moment. Gomez had pinned it on me right there in the shuttlebay, but I got the distinct feeling that Liz was so mad at me that she wouldn’t have given a damn about my promotion. Of course, I had a pretty good idea_ **_why_ ** _she was mad at me, but I’d done it with the best of intentions_ _.  I’d even hoped she mightn’t find out, though that was a bit of a long shot, given the way the rumor mill works around here – and given what had happened, the mill would go so far into overdrive it’d be a miracle if the wheels didn’t fall off altogether._

_"Look, Liz, darlin', I'd have told you he was comin', but given your history with him..."_

_"This has nothing to do with our history!" she told me fiercely. "And don't you dare 'darlin'' me! After all these years, despite all you've accomplished, you_ **_still_ ** _had to get back at him!"_

_"What about it?" I said blankly. Really and truly, I didn’t get what the hell she was so mad about. "After what he did to you, I'd have thought you'd appreciate knowin' he got a little payback!"_

_"What makes you think I want revenge?" Her voice was scornful. "And even if I did, you're not my dad and you're not my brother. As much as I appreciate your friendship, Trip, it's not your place to get even for me!"_

_"Well, it's not like I had much choice," I tried defending myself. "Yeah, I was promised a reward for my help, but I_ ** _had orders_**. _They only came through a few minutes before his ship got in range of the station; so I didn't exactly have time to consult with anyone, or decide which way I wanted to jump on this thing. An' you know what happens to people who disobey orders from the Triad. Since it was two against one, I decided to go with majority rules. They might have been offerin' me a carrot, Liz, but they were also standin' behind me with a pretty big goddamn stick!"_

 _She scoffed and rolled her eyes at me, and I had to ask myself (not for the first time) what the hell I’d thought I was doing by taking her under my wing all those years ago when Reed left her high and dry after we recovered the_ Defiant _. There are days when I think all I succeeded in doing was to turn a sad pathetic little pain in the ass into a loud and obnoxious great big pain in the ass._

_"I'm not talking about that," she said. "I know you were in no position to refuse Alpha and Em."_

_"Well then, what the hell_ are _you goin' on about? 'Cause I gotta tell you, Liz, I really don't know!"_

  " _Damn it, Trip! You kicked him when he was down!"_

_And all of a sudden, she was sobbing. All I could do was hold her, and look at T'Pol glaring at us from the bed. I tried an eye-roll that said ‘Well, what **else** am I supposed to do?’ but I wasn’t sure she was buying it, though at least she stayed where she was._

_"I thought you were a better man than that," Liz blubbered against my chest, and I wasn't sure if she was crying for General Mayhem_ (Got it right that time! But I still prefer Major Maladjustment) _or me or maybe herself.  And then, I felt bad for kicking Reed, not because I'd hurt **him** , but because I'd hurt Liz. She’d done a lot of recovering since the bad old days aboard _Enterprise _, but she’d taken serious damage from that sick bastard before he dumped her – the sort of damage that may never heal completely, right down where it matters._

_Eventually, I got her calmed down. It took a shot of my best bourbon and half an hour of holding her and talking nonsense with T'Pol glaring daggers at me all the while, but she finally pulled herself back together enough to go off to the mess hall and have some dinner._

_Like an idiot, I sat down at my desk to think. That's when T'Pol crept up on me. In the middle of a very intense neuro-pressure session, she said, "I believe you have disappointed Lieutenant Cutler."_

_Son of a bitch! She can go weeks at a time without saying a word. Why'd she have to drop that on me right before bed?_

_Of course, I didn't sleep well that night. I'm pretty sure that was her intent._

  So, when Liz came by the other day, asking me to do her a favor, I agreed – though if I’d been less distracted at the time I’d probably have asked her what it was before I nodded.  As it was, when she told me what she wanted, I was more confused than anything else.  I asked her how my riding in the turbolift with Reed could possibly be a favor to her, and her reply left me with more questions than it answered.

  "Revenge is personal," she'd said. "Since you're so determined he has to pay for the things he's done to us, I want to make sure you enjoy every possible moment of it."

  She said it kind of mean though, like she really hoped it would suck.

  So here I am, in the turbolift with Major Malfunction (General Disorder). Bullied here by a little girl ten years my junior, four ranks beneath me, who barely comes up to my chin. I don't know what the hell Liz was expecting, but I don't mind one damned bit seeing him suffer.  Matter of fact, it kind of makes up for some of the things I had to watch him doing back aboard _Enterprise_ , where he pretty well had free rein for whatever his twisted mind could dream up.

  He's strapped to a weird sort of gurney and doesn't look at all comfortable with his ass just about hanging off the end and his legs splayed and strapped to the bars underneath the cushion. There's this odd grimace on his face, almost like a stillborn snarl, like he was just about to tell someone off or was looking forward to a fight when Phlox hit him again with his magic paralyzing potion.

  He's lost muscle mass and tone already. I can tell that. Back on _Enterprise_ I had occasion to see him shirtless a few times. Usually in the gym, but once in the corridor near his quarters chasing some little naked ensign who thought she could escape one of his interrogations (which of course she couldn’t – if she’d had the sense she was born with she’d have realized resistance just made him even more determined to break her). He wasn't bulky like Mayweather or even muscled like Archer, but he was ripped. He was far more compact than the other guys, and I remember thinking he could have been chiseled from marble. Always slim, it doesn't look like he's lost any weight, yet, but he's definitely softer.

  Liz told me he's been strapped to the bio-bed round the clock since he arrived. I don't know what else she expects. Reed's not some lapdog you're going to exercise on a leash. He's more like a stubborn old pit bull you turn loose to run in a big yard with a high fence, because if you try to take him for a walk, you're going to come home with _him_ walking _you –_ that’s if you’re still walking at all and he hasn’t ripped one of your legs off. Frankly, Em Gomez is the only person I'd trust to take him out for an airing, and if she doesn't think she's up to the task (probably pretty sensible of her, considering she helped take him down), then we're all a lot safer leaving him right where he is.

  I wonder if he's cold laying there naked. I've ordered facilities and maintenance to keep the station at 20˚C. It's a bit on the cool side if you have a sedentary job, but seeing as how we build and dismantle starships here, if my people aren't moving, there's a damned good chance they aren't doing their jobs. I’ve allowed a good bit of leeway for folks to adjust the temperature in their private quarters; I think people perform better at work when they're comfortable at home. Our uniforms are long-sleeved, and as long as I don't have to look at it, I let my people wear any kind of underwear they want. So, anyone who's uncomfortable at 20˚C just needs to grow up and learn how to dress themselves.

  It comes to me that the least they could have done was cover him with a sheet or a blanket. Instead, they've just draped his boys and their brother with a filmy, translucent fabric that might hide the details but does nothing to preserve his dignity when they've left everything else on display. It almost makes it worse, I think, like they're trying to deny that he came with a package down there.

  Then there's that strange looking, pink-lipped little mouth on his belly. Completely apart from the fact that it's in entirely the wrong place for what it is and doesn't really belong to him anyway, it doesn't quite look entirely human.

  What the fuck did they do to him? Okay, yeah, I know, but still, _what the fuck?_

  All he can do is roll his eyes, and they're moving constantly, desperate, I'm sure, to catch sight of something, _any_ thing, that will give him a clue as to what's coming next.  When I move into his field of vision, he locks his gaze on me, and even now I feel like there's a target on my chest; back in the old days it felt like he had cross-hairs on his retinas. He can't even glare at me properly, though, because he can't move his face. I wonder, if he could speak, would he ever ask me to help him, or would he just curse me for my part in getting him into this mess to begin with? In case he’s in any doubt as to what _I_ feel about the situation, I make sure to smile at him, just so he knows how glad I am to see him ... in his current predicament.

  When the turbolift arrives at its destination, I move to the back so the orderlies can wheel the gurney out. Reed's eyes stay locked onto me, rolling in his head as I move and as the gurney is turned, until he can no longer get a line of sight. The lift doors close, and I allow myself to sag against the back wall. I only realize I have been holding my breath when I find myself gasping for it.

  Christ on a painted pony! _Now_ I know what Liz was up to.

  I have no stomach for revenge, and finally I realize it.  How the hell did she know that before I did?

  In the abstract it’s okay; hell, I even gloated over the idea of Reed getting some of his own medicine for a change, but the reality ... the reality’s a whole different ball game.  When I actually saw it, it made me sick.  Yeah, I let him see me grinning at him, because that’s what’s supposed to happen, but there was a part of me that was just appalled by what had been done to a human being – even a sorry excuse for a human being like General Malcolm Reed.

  I wouldn’t have said I’d ever, _ever_ , feel any pity for that bastard.  I’m not sure what I feel now actually _is_ pity, not exactly, but ... hell.  Maybe it’s the contrast, the immense fall from his position as one of the MACO Triad to a helpless prisoner trussed up on a gurney, just another of Phlox's unwilling lab rats being wheeled away to ... well, to whatever the other two have planned for him.  Though the surgery points to a few things, none of which I particularly want to contemplate.

  Well, what's done is done. I don't have to see him again, and I grit my teeth and tell myself I'm sure he'll deserve everything he gets. After what he’s done in the course of his career, he’s the last man in the world I should be worrying about.  As far as I'm concerned, anything short of a slow and painful death is less than he deserves.

  And there's absolutely no reason I need to be there to watch it.


	8. 07: There Are Always Alternatives (General Malcolm Reed)

  As I finally arrive at my destination my system is jumping with adrenaline, my mind almost equally divided between fear, relief and desperation.  I want to live, I always have, but whatever’s coming for me let it come _now_ – for God’s sake let me be over with the waiting.

  I suppose insofar as I’d expected anything, I’d expected some kind of laboratory.  But this is no laboratory or anything like it; this is a state room, done out like something I’d expect to see in one of Sato’s palaces.  It’s exquisitely tasteful, insofar as I’m a judge of such things; the very little power of movement I still have (enough to let me blink and swallow, but not much else) also allows me to turn my eyes slightly, so that my peripheral vision suggests one or two ornaments here and there whose utter simplicity is the most eloquent testimony to their costliness.

  The gurney is pushed into the required position, the brakes are applied, and the lackeys bob their heads obsequiously and depart.  They don’t bob their heads at _me_ , I hasten to add.  There are drapes of probably fabulously expensive material hanging from the ceiling, and if they’re not bed-hangings you can call me a selection of hors d’oeuvres and eat me.

  Oops. Probably not the best choice of words, that.  I control another impotent impulse to guffaw as I reflect that I should be surrounded by canapés and those little crackers with heaps of sturgeon caviar.  But cancel the wine cooler – you drink red wine at room temperature, and forgetting that would offend Alice’s sensibilities so horribly he’d probably feel obliged to exit via the nearest airlock.

  (I hope someone ties those drapes out of the way.  The bill for getting those clean would probably bankrupt the Empire....)

  After a moment’s silence I hear the rustle of fabric.  My already thundering pulse finds it can still speed up just a notch more.

  They say the Ancient Greeks believed their goddess Aphrodite rose from the sea at the island of Crete.  Em rises into my vision looking lovelier than any goddess.  She’s wearing nothing but some drapery of cobwebby lace in which an occasional tiny jewel winks like a misty star.  Her lips are flushed with arousal, and as they fasten on mine there’s nothing I can do but respond.  I can’t move, but my brain furnishes me with all the memories and images I need, and my system flushes with raging desire so fast it takes even me by surprise.

  I want her.  I want her so badly I can hardly control my lust, and there’s nothing left in me that can even ask _why_ as she mounts me after all she's done – evidently whatever that stuff was in the hypospray isn’t proof against the rush of testosterone. The part of me still raw from her betrayal doesn't want to respond, but no man can hold back the sea; I feel every nerve in my body betraying me as the physiological response instantaneously overwhelms me. I hear the ocean roaring in my ears, feel the tide washing over my body, and I can't help myself. I still _want_ her.

  I surrender completely.  She takes me, and it’s as glorious as ever.  I’m still shuddering and gasping with the violence of my climax as she bends close to me.  “ _Perdóname, querido,_ ” she whispers, and then she’s moving, and someone else is taking her place.

  Blue eyes, bluer than azure coins, stare down into my dazed amazement.

  And at last I know what has been transplanted into me, and what my purpose is.  Even pinned beneath the once-beloved body, I have enough breath left to scream with anguish as I realise that the last act of the tragedy is upon me.

  I may survive this.  I may not.  My survival is not the key issue.

  The alpha male must breed.  The alpha female is not dispensable.

  There are always alternatives.


	9. 08: Mist and Cobwebs (General Malcolm Reed)

My treatment afterwards is exemplary.

I’m wheeled away and washed.  If it mattered I could notice that a medi-scanner is passed rapidly across my belly and nods of cautious optimism are exchanged.  There are different fluids in the bag that is hooked up to the ever-present drip beside me, and presently movement is generously allowed to return – within the usual limits, of course, which are not exactly large.

Even Phlox’s air of the conjurer who has succeeded in producing an entire shuttlepod out of a very small hat passes almost unnoticed.  He doesn’t matter enough for it to register more than the faintest, briefest flicker of awareness.  _Nothing_ matters.  I’m so stunned that it feels as though every neuron in my brain has stopped firing.  I don’t think.  I don’t want to think.  Thinking will be beyond bearing, and so I refuse thought.

This may be something to do with the chemicals now being flushed into me, though it doesn’t feel as if it is.  Maybe it’s what’s left of my self that pretends to have that much control, the only control that remains to me.  I can choose not to feel.  I can choose not to think.  I can choose not to understand.

So I do.

Tucker visits, of course.  He knows about the Procedure.  Everyone knows, apparently.  I’m the only one who doesn’t.  He grins down at me.  “Kinda reminds me of an old classic they ran on Movie Night ‘bout a month ago: ‘The Devil Wears Prada’.”

The lackeys think it’s hilarious.  By the way he watches me, he’s expecting some kind of reaction.  I don’t acknowledge the gibe. Actually, I don’t even understand it.  I’m made of mist and cobwebs, and as I stare back into his face I think I even glimpse what looks strangely like an unwilling flicker of pity as he turns away.

Time was when even the suggestion of pity from Trip Tucker would have eaten at me like acid.  Now only a vague puzzlement stirs the cobwebs before they settle again.

Hours pass.  Days pass.  I no longer count them. Even my grasp of the identities of those around me starts to drift.

One morning the odd-looking doctor scowls.  I have apparently done something very bad.  They fasten absorbent pads on my belly and I think someone may hit me, but nobody does.  After a while the pads are no longer required, and there is some debate about whether the chemicals were too strong, or not strong enough, but anyway they argue themselves into some kind of decision and presumably a change is made.  Then one day they wheel me out of Sickbay again.  There is pleasure followed by pain, and I am not at all sure which of them makes me scream, but I am still screaming when I’m brought back to Sickbay and they sedate me quickly because this amount of agitation is not good for the Procedure.

The sedation and the chemicals and someone they refer to as The Patient do not agree with each other.  There follows a period where I laugh and snarl and try to bite people, but nobody comes close enough to me for that, and I alternate between feeling intense loneliness for physical contact and intense dread of it.  Now and again I glimpse a female with whom I associate ‘testing functionality’ – the phrase eddies out of the cobwebs and seems horribly significant for some reason – and it takes several sessions of hasty readjustments of the chemicals before they make the connection between my howling and her arrival.

After that I don’t see her any more.

Hours pass.  Days pass.  I know this because different people look at the readings above my head and pass the medi-scanners across my belly, and talk about the Procedure.  I begin to understand that the Procedure is very, very important.  The odd-looking doctor certainly seems to think so.  He becomes very tense as time goes on, and so do I, because if I do something wrong for a second time it’s even more likely that someone will hit me and then afterwards there will be screaming again and it will be me doing it.

But time goes on, and a stealthy sense of hope begins to pervade Sickbay.  People smile when they look down at my belly and this makes me very relieved, because if they are pleased they won’t make me scream again, will they?

Will they?

I’m afraid of daring to hope.  I try to breathe as slowly and shallowly as I can, so as not to upset the Procedure, but this becomes very difficult the day the two people whom I associate with the screaming come into Sickbay and look at the box on the wall above my head and then at my belly.  I find my breath coming in terrified little gasps, and the doctor (I think he’s a doctor) does something to the chemicals hanging beside my bed and then suddenly I feel calmer, though my heart is still kicking with fright.

Fortunately the people go away again quite quickly when the doctor tells them about it.  For a while there is a kind of muted consternation around me in case all this may have affected the Procedure, but apparently it didn’t.  The doctor is definitely very happy about this, and I am able to relax again.  One day I overhear him talking into a little box and he says The Patient is progressing excellently; I’m not sure who or what The Patient is, but if this chap’s a doctor presumably he’s trying to help The Patient get better, so that proves he’s nice, doesn’t it?  Armed with this certainty, I smile hopefully at him next time he comes to look down at me.  He looks so startled I feel guilty for not smiling at him oftener.  To my surprise he pats me awkwardly on the shoulder, which feels so lovely/horrible/wonderful/awful/soothing/terrifying that I hear myself making whimpering, choking sounds and water runs out of my eyes. This is evidently not good for The Procedure, for he makes more adjustments to the chemicals and soon I stop and everything is calm again.  He’s such a kind doctor that he doesn’t pat me any more, which makes me very grateful to him.  We don’t want anything to go wrong with The Procedure, because that would mean ... that would .... Something stirs among the cobwebs and I shudder.  I don’t want to look there, and fortunately someone is at hand to look at the box above my bed and adjust the chemicals accordingly so I forget again.

=/\=

Time passes.

Presently I become aware of discomfort low in my body.  It’s not much, but I feel ... odd.  Heavy.  Especially when people move me to bathe me, when they seem to take extra trouble to lift and turn me very gently.  They rub stuff into the back of me and put down thick pads of soft material for me to lie on, which feels very comfortable when they put me down again.

There’s a butterfly in Sickbay.  I’m surprised the doctor should allow such a thing, because it probably isn’t very hygienic, but in the meantime it’s company for me so I don’t mention it to anyone.  It sits on my belly.  Obviously I can’t see it, but I can feel it fluttering, which is a companionable sort of feeling.

Later on, I twig that the butterfly must be a pet of some kind.  I mean, it’s not possible that _nobody_ notices it, because it flaps away like a good ‘un down there, and it’s not just when there’s only the two of us about.  Now and again it arrives when somebody’s looking at the box over my head, and everyone makes delighted noises.  I’m sure I don’t know why everyone should get so excited about a butterfly, but if they’re happy, I’m happy.  At least until the day when They reappear; I’d almost managed to forget about Them altogether, but one glance up into blue coins and everyone starts rushing about, colliding with each other in their haste to get the chemicals changed.  Fortunately somebody manages to get it done and the butterfly stops screaming – hair-raising noise, that, I’d never have thought anything that small could make such a racket.  After that the doctor shoos everyone out, and for a while the lights go down and the butterfly and I are left to tremble ourselves into quiet.


	10. 09: Caregiver (Ensign Elizabeth Cutler)

  I never thought when I volunteered to be Trip’s eyes and ears in Sickbay that it would prove such an ordeal. Of course, I made the offer years ago, when he first brought me onto the station. It wasn't really needed then because Dr. Lucas was a decent man who cared about his patients, or most of them, anyway. That was back in the early days when Trip was just starting to take control of the place, and a lot of the people who worked here were just irredeemable. You can't expect anyone, even a doctor with the highest sense of medical ethics, to genuinely care about everyone, but at least Dr. Lucas followed proper medical procedure and managed a polite bedside manner, even for those whom he'd probably just as soon have euthanized for a hangnail were he to follow his own (usually correct) instincts about them. I've seen Phlox let people die of infected wounds that could be cured with nothing more than a clean dressing and an injection of the proper antibiotics.

  I used to try to get Trip involved, to get him to _order_ Phlox to treat his patients. But then one day he came in with a plasma burn on his wrist. As plasma burns go, it wasn't bad, but there was no way he could have treated it with the supplies in a standard first aid kit. After that, I didn't bother him about interfering with Phlox's neglect anymore. This station is a lot safer than it used to be, but engineering is still a dangerous profession. All it would take is one serious injury beyond my capability to treat, and Phlox could rid himself of any gadfly quite literally without doing a thing.

  Sometimes, I still manage to get away with treating some of those poor neglected patients myself, if it really is just a matter of a shot and a bandage. You can get away with quite a lot when people think you're stupid and your mind is shattered and you're not even important enough to kill. But Phlox always shouts at me till I cry when I do that, so I can't pretend not to know any better a second time. I can and do behave as if I am too stupid to understand that the same logic that applies to one patient will apply to the next, but if someone needs more than one treatment, there isn't much I can do.

  I do my best anyway.

  If we'd known then what we know now, I’m sure Trip would have tried to keep me out of Sickbay. He acts like he thinks he's my big brother, always trying to protect me. We'd have fought about it, and I'd have won because he just can't stand to see me cry.

  I’m not a saint, no matter what Trip thinks – or anyone else for that matter.  Though I suppose what most people think of me is that I’m a weakling, an idiot.  Enslaved by a man capable of so much terrible evil.

  He’s not capable of it now.  He lies there bound hand and foot, helpless and hopeless.  He’s drugged up every second, not only to stabilize the fetus inside him but to keep him quiescent, because if he knew what was happening to him the stress levels in his body would probably bring on another spontaneous abortion.

  Of course, nobody asks _why_ I offered to be one of the team tasked with caring for him.  They laugh and thank me for taking on more than my share.  Everyone knows I was Reed’s bitch, everyone thinks he broke my mind so thoroughly that I can’t leave him even now.

  Well.  Maybe some of that’s true, though not in the way they think.  Not that I give a damn what they think, right or wrong.

_Malcolm._   Time for his skin conditioning.  It’s desperately necessary on his back, of course, because constantly lying in one position – even on the softest bedding that can be provided – would bring him out in pressure sores if he weren’t tended carefully.  And even though there are bandages under the straps around his wrists, ankles and forehead, they can’t save the skin there from the unrelenting pressure and the friction with every small movement.

_Somebody_ cares.  I want to believe somebody cares, that it’s not just another precaution against inflammation and infection that caused somebody to give orders for the lesions to be treated; I’m pretty sure Phlox wouldn’t bother.  I wish they'd care enough to let us diaper him instead of having that damned catheter in him all the time. It's just bad practice and asking for an infection. And if he's going to be too doped up to eat, we should introduce a G-tube instead of intravenous solutions. 'If the gut works, use it,' is such a fundamental concept in patient care and nutrition that it's a searchable phrase in any medical library.

  Of course, Phlox knows this. He actually has a real medical degree from a proper university. The fact that he isn't following best practices can only mean that he doesn't care, which I can easily believe, or that he's deliberately seeking to hurt and humiliate Malcolm even more than necessary for the completion of this barbaric experiment, which is no less likely.

  I wonder briefly if I brought the situation to Em Gomez whether she would do anything about it. She _wants_ that baby, and I think she might actually care about Malcolm, too, as much as she can care about anybody other than herself. Then I remember that she knows who I am and if she is even the tiniest bit jealous, I could be dead before the start of my next shift.

  Then who will be here to actually _care_ about Malcolm?

  I can't dismiss the idea of appealing to Em entirely, but I decide it can wait, for now.

  Aware as I am every moment of my life that I’m under surveillance, especially here where half a dozen cameras scan every inch of his body and everyone who goes near it, I’m meticulously careful to follow the rules.  I make sure that all of the buckles are as tight as they should be before I loosen one of them, the one around his right wrist.  It’s always the right wrist I treat first.  Despite all the work Phlox did on it, I can still see the pale tracks of the scars on his hand, and I can remember all too well my terror that it had been shattered past repair by Trip’s vindictive revenge-attack on the _Defiant_ ; it would have been the end of his career, and the captain would have thrown him out an airlock without a second thought.

  I think he knows I’m here, though I doubt if they’ve left him enough awareness to know who I am.  Below the strap that keeps his head still, his eyes stare vacantly at the ceiling.  I wonder if he’s lonely. He never speaks, but then nobody ever speaks to _him_ ; who bothers speaking to a lab rat?

  His hand lies unresisting as I carefully peel the dressing away.  Despite all the treatment, the skin looks worse than it did last time.  He won’t be feeling any pain from it – the meds will see to that – but even so I bite my lip. I’ve chilled the ointment so that it’ll feel comforting as I smooth it in. I don my gloves; though I long to touch his skin, they are a vital measure of protection against infection. As I begin the fingertip massage to apply the medication to the sorest-looking places, the tiniest flutter of a smile touches the edge of his mouth.

_That feels good, huh, sweetie?_ I can’t say it, of course; there are technicians in the room and I won’t do anything to make him even more of an object of mockery.  I have to listen to them talking about him like he’s some kind of _thing_ , not even a man any more.  They daren’t talk about him outside the room, the orders are clear on that, but they’re so cruel.  They say things they’d never have dared even _think_ if he was on his feet and in his right mind.

  ‘In his right mind’… Who was he once?  Before the MACOs got hold of him and hurt him and warped him and turned him into what he is?  Or did it start earlier, when he was still a boy? So many children are neglected and abandoned, hurt and abused by their parents. Or worse.

  When I was fourteen, one of my friends just a few weeks older than me was sold to one of the comfort houses on the outskirts of Starfleet HQ. Jillian had been so bright, so clever, and so pretty. If she could have stayed in school, she could have really done something with her life. But her parents had been black-balled because some neighbor had been pulled in for interrogation and, desperate to make the torture stop, had started blurting names. Not the names of seditionists or rebel collaborators, just names of people he knew. Jilly's parents hadn't been able to work for a couple of years because of that, and she had three little sisters who needed to eat, so on her fifteenth birthday, the day it became legal, they sold her into a five-year contract with the Golden Gate Comfort House.

  When I enlisted in Starfleet, they sent me to the Academy in San Francisco for my induction training because I had good test scores. On one of my days of liberty, I looked her up. I paid her for her time, of course, but she wasn't my friend anymore, not like she used to be. She'd gotten so _old_ ; she was wearing lipstick that was too bright, and her clothes showed off far too much of her breasts, so that passing men looked at her. She said couldn't even remember our other friends, the music we used to like, or even the games we'd played. When I talked about them she just nodded like she was humoring me and waiting for the time to be up. I wondered what happened to her that could make her forget so much about who she was and how she'd lived.

  I think maybe I found out soon after I was posted to _Enterprise_.

  Malcolm is not a good man.  He’s done terrible things, and still would if he ever got free.  I can’t even hope that he’d make an exception for me if he found me here, in league with the people who’ve carried out this awful abuse of his body, no matter what my reasons might be.  What I feel for him doesn’t blind me to the danger of loving him, to the cruelty, the hatred and spite that made him one of the most loathed and feared men in the Empire.

  I was a virgin when I was ordered onto _Enterprise_.  I’d wanted to wait, to save myself for someone special if it was humanly possible, but even before they brought me on board I knew that was out of the question.  Reed’s reputation had spread like cancer, and he soon went on to justify everything I’d heard, and more.

  But in the middle of all the pain and brutality that was just as bad as I’d expected, there was one little unexpected act.

  I’d thought about doping myself up beforehand but decided against it; I’d need all my wits about me when the interrogation began. It never even occurred to me that he’d show the slightest pity for me, and it was hours later when it finally dawned on me what he’d done.

  Not much, on the surface.  A bottle thrust into my mouth, fiery liquid washing down my throat.  A rough-and-ready anesthesia while he did what he’d been going to.

  Anesthesia?

_Reed?_

_Why?_

  It wasn’t my last visit of course, nor by any means the worst.  Sometimes he was pure animal, uncaring of whatever pain he caused, too consumed by his need to regard me as anything more than something useful to help him find relief.  But the weird thing was – okay, maybe you’ll think I was deluded, Stockholm Syndrome, I know all about it – just sometimes, just _very occasionally_ , there was…

  He didn’t kiss like ordinary people.  Most times he didn’t kiss at all.  But every now and then, when he was tired and sleepy, he’d let me cuddle up to him as long as I moved very slowly and carefully. At first, I only did it because I was cold, and too tired and sore to straggle back to my quarters right then if I didn't absolutely have to. And once or twice, when our faces were close together, he’d give me this tiny gentle lick on the mouth.  I think it bothered him when he realized what he’d done, because mostly he’d push me away afterwards as though afraid he’d showed something he shouldn’t have.  But one night much later on I gathered my nerve and licked his mouth in just the same way.

  I held my breath afterwards.  He was quite capable of breaking my arm, if not my neck, for that intrusion.  Instead, he opened his eyes and stared at me for about a minute without saying anything, his gaze absolutely unreadable; but he shut them again, and there was no push away.  After that, whenever he permitted me to cuddle him and seemed really relaxed, I did it again.  Of course every time was a risk, and of course I never forgot that.  But it was our secret, and as I stare down at him now I wish so much that I dared bend down and touch the tip of my tongue to his dry, motionless lips.


	11. 10: Machinations (Commodore Charles Tucker)

  I come back to my quarters one evening to find a vid from the news feed queued up on my monitor.

  Five or six weeks ago, I'd been called into Sickbay to deal with a misbehaving indicator light on one of the diagnostic units. Forgetting my decision in the turbo-lift (maybe because I knew I had an image to uphold, which included hating and baiting Major Maladjustment, _General Disarray, damn it_ , or maybe because I’d gone temporarily insane), I decided to pay Reed a visit while I was there. I cracked a joke at his expense that should have had him spitting and hissing like a cornered cat, even if he didn't get it, because everyone else was laughing at him.

  Instead I just got a vacant stare. It was like the body was there but the man himself was somewhere else, somewhere out of reach, maybe somewhere safe.

  When I got back to my quarters that night, I realized I was getting that same stare from T'Pol a lot, especially on the nights when I decided to introduce a little novelty into our routine.  Knowing _I_ was the cause of that vacant gaze gave me the creeps. I got used to my scars a long time ago, but the next morning, it was tough to face myself in the mirror.

  I still don't know whether I was being kind or cruel or just selfish, but I wanted to keep her mind active and have her present when I was with her. So, I decided to give her access to a few things: the news feeds, one entertainment channel that consisted mainly of soap operas and gameshows, and limited portions of the station's scientific and technical libraries, which now included everything from the _Defiant's_ database (except those few files I've downloaded to a removable storage device and kept to myself, in case my life ever depends on pulling a rabbit out of a hat). She never said thank you, but within a couple of weeks, I started coming home to different little ... well ... memos, I guess you'd call them.

  Sometimes, there's an excerpt from a text that relates to research I'm doing for improvements on the new class of ships we're due to roll out in the next year. At least once a week, there's a trivia question from some damned gameshow that the fact-checkers got wrong. I don't know if she expects me to contact the producers and correct them or what, but she seems satisfied when I snort and say something derogatory about the intelligence of people in the entertainment industry.

  Once, I had to tell her, "Look, that's somethin' we technically don't know yet. You got that information from the _Defiant_ database."

  She curled up on her corner of the bed and sulked.

  "Pout all you like!" I told her. "You can't be holdin' people responsible for things they haven't learned yet."

  And sometimes, there's stuff like this. Reminders of a problem I have to solve, a loose end I have to tie up. One of the news stations wanted to do a profile of me following my promotion. I refused them. Apart from not wanting my face on every monitor in the Empire (my sister Sarah says it still upsets Mama to see my scars), I don't want anybody looking too closely at some of the operations we have going on here. Some of them, while they're no detriment to the Empire, don't _always_ run exactly by the book.

  So apparently, some enterprising reporter decided to do the profile without my participation. He went trolling through my service record and my private life for acquaintances who were willing to talk about me. One person in particular usually has a lot to say.

  Kelby has always been a worthless piece of shit. He was pissed when the Empress posted him to Jupiter Station as my XO. He was actually entertaining ideas of being Chief Engineer on his own ship someday. Problem is, he doesn't have enough brains to blow his nose, and his service record shows it. He's good at following orders and knows how to operate systems, I'll give him that much. But a good engineer has imagination. A good engineer is a problem-solver. Kelby has never designed, developed, invented, or improved a damned thing. He's never solved a single problem, and he neither inspires nor intimidates people enough to make them work for him efficiently. I wouldn't put him in charge of taking lunch orders for the galley during a double shift of emergency repairs.

  Now, his fat, ugly face fills my screen, and when I hit play, he says, "I'm sure, if you ask the Chief, he'll tell you the _Defiant_ specs were a team effort. Everybody did their bit, and then he presented the finished product to the Empress. The Chief's real big on teamwork. I mean, look how he's turned the Jupiter shipyards around in the past few years. You don't accomplish something like that all on your own."

  "We tried asking Commodore Tucker," the reporter says. "He refused to speak to us."

  "Oh? Well, I don't know what to make of that," says Kelby in a tone that suggests he actually does have opinions about it that he's not comfortable sharing.

  Typically of the so-called ‘news’ in the Empire, the reporter tries to turn it into a conspiracy story.  Kelby, of course, now skillfully deflects the suggestion in just such a way as to make it obvious he personally wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there really _was_ something crooked going on, and I have to admit, he's not quite as stupid as I tend to assume, even if he's not quite as smart as he thinks he is, either.

  Now, anybody who knows the truth of the _Defiant_ knows Kelby was lying with every breath in that interview. Problem is, there's too many influential people who _don't_ know that my engineers could barely manage to follow my orders to keep the _Defiant_ flying. They did a fine job running a ship that was generations ahead of anything they'd ever seen, but it isn't bragging to say I was the only man alive at that time who actually understood how it _worked_. There was no team effort because there was no team. I was in a league of my own.

  I refused the interview mostly because I don't want my people to see me as a glory hound. It's not their fault that none of them have my gifts, and being born with a superior mechanical mind that works a little differently to most people's isn't exactly an accomplishment that I achieved through any effort of my own. If anybody deserves any credit for the _Defiant_ specs, I guess it's my mama and daddy – and to be fair, Jonathan Archer (may he rot in hell!), for taking the initiative to go out and get her.

  Still, I can't say it was a mistake to turn the interview down. The way my luck rolls, they'd have been filming in the corridors just as Phlox's minions came rolling a naked, screaming Reed back to Sickbay. Then they would have had a _real_ conspiracy to report.

  "You know, this is just about perfect timin'," I tell T'Pol.

  She doesn't say anything, but she raises that one brow and I swear the corner of her mouth quirks up for just a moment in a smirk that's gone before I'm sure I saw it.

  First, I have to put my security protocol in place. Anybody in the Imperial Fleet who doesn't think their communications are being monitored round the clock is a fool. For most people, it doesn't matter too much. For those who are scratching and clawing their way up the food chain and those of us who have already made it to the top, finding a way to secure certain communications is a matter of life and death.

  My protocol is a little more complicated than most, but I'm an engineer and I've had a lot of years to consider and resolve the various issues of private communication in a suspicious Empire. A flip of a switch depolarizes my monitor screen. Better than a micro-louvre privacy filter, it turns everything to white light, and the images can only be seen through the polarized contact lenses I pop in my eyes. I used to wear glasses, but the Empress didn't like not being able to see my eyes, and there's no overestimating the benefits of humoring the Empress. Even a regular optical camera trained right on my monitor won't see what I'm seeing.

  Next, I turn on a high-powered, selective signal scrambler. It's powerful enough to disrupt even hard-wired and fiber-optic transmissions, turning everything to white noise on the other end, except on the frequency I choose to leave undistorted. It also covers me just in case that optical camera has a polarized lens.

  Finally, I turn up some music and turn down the lights. If someone is determined to eavesdrop, a glass of water or an old-fashioned stethoscope against the wall and a simple peep-hole to let them read my lips will do, and ironically, even the best of high-tech solutions is often useless against the lowest-tech problems.

  With everything in place, I contact the Empress.

  Hoshi never answers when I call. She's too busy to drop what she's doing every time someone calls for her because people are always calling. She's got a whole switchboard of operators fielding her correspondence. Nine out of ten people never get to speak to her personally.

  However, I have the code for her personal secretary. Della always smiles when she sees me, and it always seems sincere. Sometimes she even flirts. I wonder if she has any idea how much I appreciate that simple kindness. I ask her to request that the Empress return my call at her convenience. Yes, it's relating to the Kelby interview.  That’ll get me fast-tracked; at a guess, Hoshi wasn’t a lot more pleased about that than I was.

  I potter around for a bit, reviewing T'Pol's browser history just to see what else she's been up to, scanning and signing a couple of reports from my department heads, approving a requisition from the galley, and completing a personnel transfer request.

  Ten minutes later, when the monitor chimes a personal call from the Empress's private line, I order T'Pol off the bed and onto the floor. Hoshi knows very well who shares my bed at night; hell, she gifted her to me shortly after she declared all alien Starfleet personnel slaves of the Empire (including the Vulcans who had until then enjoyed special status). But she likes the fantasy that all the men in her life only have eyes for her. I don't mind indulging her as long as she returns my calls promptly, which I suspect she'll do as long as I keep things running smoothly here. We turned the tide in the war for her by stepping up production and putting sturdier, more advanced ships out on the line. But I know she doesn't humor me out of gratitude. She's just very aware of the fact that I have enough people in the right places to turn the tide against her again if she doesn't keep me happy.

  She saves her gratitude for the fact that I'm relatively low-maintenance.

  _"What do you want me to do to them?"_ she asks. No small talk, not even a greeting. I actually like that about Hoshi. She doesn't waste my time and I don't waste hers. And we each know that the other is only our friend so long as the relationship remains mutually beneficial.

  Reed isn't the only one who would shit whole turnips to hear the Empress asking _me_ what I wanted from _her_. I've never been particularly power hungry, but I discovered not so long ago that I had to acquire a certain amount of it in order to get what I _really_ wanted – the freedom to do my job without getting a crick in my neck from looking over my shoulder all the damned time. Once I had enough of it to be allowed to work in peace, I learned very quickly that _real_ power does not require constant exercise. In fact, judicious, somewhat irregular use of it can make those under your power almost eager to serve when called upon. And there are times when the Empress is effectively under my power, simply because there are things I can do that she can't.  Neither of us ever states that in so many words, but we understand the situation perfectly.

  "The news report? Ignore it. The reporter, the producer, the station, just forget about 'em," I tell her, my tone deliberately careless. "There's enough crap like that out there that, if we just act like it's beneath our notice, the story will never grow legs an' no one will care."

_"Then what do you want?"_

  I smile. I love hearing her ask me that. The only thing I'd like better would be to answer with a request for a lewd act that included her, me, and T'Pol, but asking for something like that would probably lead to me getting certain bits lopped off that would be necessary for me to participate in the act in question.

  "Kelby, here, as soon as possible," I tell her instead. Discretion’s the better part of valor when it comes to keeping my privates attached.

 _"Are you sure?"_ she asks in surprise. She trusts my counsel, at least as far as the Corps of Engineers goes, and I don't try to advise her on anything else so it's rare that she questions me. _"Won't it cause a stir when the one man who was willing to speak to them gets recalled to Jupiter Station and winds up dead?"_

  "Empress, you know me better than that," I remind her, and she does. I don't kill unless I have to, and I don't have to kill Kelby. With what I have planned, he'll either be loyal to me, out on the front line and too busy to make trouble, or dead by Em and Alpha's hands in less than a year.

_"What do you have planned?"_

  "Oh, I won't bore you with the details, Empress," I tell her. "Suffice it to say, I won't kill him, but he might end up wishin’ I had."

  Ironically, my memory of the gameshow not knowing what we learned from the future informs my decision regarding Kelby here in the present.

  "If anyone asks, we'll tell them I decided that I hadn't provided him with sufficient mentorin' when we were so busy with the _Defiant_ specs an' bringin' Jupiter Station up to par," I advise the Empress. "You can't hold someone responsible for what they haven't learned yet, so we've agreed that he's been treated unfairly an' deserves a second chance. Now that things are workin' as they should be, I can give him the support and trainin' he should have had in the beginnin'. He's bein' given another opportunity to excel. Who knows? Maybe five years down the road, the same reporter will be doin' a profile on _him_."

  _"Sounds devious,"_ she says with a saucy little smirk. Even after all these years, she sometimes reminds me of a naughty schoolgirl. _"Send through the orders and I'll approve them myself."_

  I hit the appropriate button, and she laughs. _"That confident, were you?"_

  "In your wisdom, yes, Ma'am," I reply with a little extra drawl in my voice. Even though she started out as a linguist, and a very gifted one at that, Empress Sato is still like any number of other women who can't completely resist the charms of a Southern Gentleman. Besides, I know how to read her moods, and if I hadn't thought she was in the mood to be amused, I would have waited twenty minutes and sent the transfer orders to her through Della.

  She glances over the form and says, her lips curving into an impish smile, _"'Top Secret. Orders to be disclosed at new command.' That's almost cruel."_

  Involuntary transfers are generally unpleasant. They usually involve MACOs pounding on someone's door, packing their things, and escorting them to the nearest shuttle without notice. When I was still a lieutenant and we were just constructing the hull for _Enterprise_ , they pulled one of my buddies out of the shower and frog-marched him through the station without even giving him a chance to wrap a towel around his waist. I never saw the guy again. Grapevine said he had been messing with some captain's snatch while the ship was in for repairs.

  "I figure it'll get him in the right frame of mind," I say. "By the time that shuttlepod opens an' he sees me here waitin' to greet him, he'll be just delighted he's not meetin' the head of sanitary engineerin' at Rura Penthe."

  She chuckles and says, _"You really are evil, you know, in a benign sort of way."_

  "Benign evil," I repeat back to her. "I like the sound of that. Is it an oxymoron or a paradox?"

  She just laughs again and asks, _"Where's he stationed now?"_

  "Utopia Planitia."

  _"Hmmm."_ She giggles maliciously, tickled pink to be my co-conspirator, and says, _"It's just 02:00 there. Why don't I just send this under my personal letterhead, with a notation, 'Orders to be executed immediately'?"_

  I couldn't be happier with her suggestion, but I just incline my head and say, "As best pleases you, Empress."

  She presses a few keys and then tells me, _"I've added an instruction to delay docking until 09:00. No need to rush your breakfast for Mister Kelby, is there?"_

  "No, Ma'am," I agree heartily.

  I hear a soft beep from her side, and she sighs heavily. _"It seems my attention is required elsewhere,"_ she says, and then, more sincerely that most people would believe, _"It was **good** hearing from you, Mister Tucker."_

  "The pleasure, as always, is mine, Empress," I reply. I make it a point to be the most hassle-free person in her life, so she’s always happy to see me. I don't come to her with problems unless I'm offering a solution, I don't shoot my mouth off trying to advise her about things I don't understand, and I try to be encouraging. I get the feeling being in charge is a lot more work than she ever expected, even if the Unholy Trinity – sorry, make that the Diabolical Duo now – actually make a lot of the decisions in the background. "You go give 'em hell, Ma'am."

=/\=

  As Kelby's orders fly through the ether to Utopia Planitia, and the Comm. Officer notifies the gamma-shift duty officer, who contacts the XO, who wakes the Captain, who orders out the MACOs, who rouse Kelby (probably from a sound sleep because he's too damned stupid to be worried about the consequences of flapping his lips for broadcast television), pile his shit into boxes, and load him and them unceremoniously into a shuttlepod, I set out on my evening rounds of Jupiter Station.

  My chef, who interviewed for the job by somehow obtaining and serving my mama's recipes for pan-fried catfish and pecan pie, doesn't even raise an eyebrow when I place a special order for breakfast. I don't know if she's ever had to make plomeek broth, but I figure T'Pol deserves a reward for putting Kelby back on my radar. I don't think she's had any of her native foods since we came here, and when I think about how I'd fare if I had to go years at a time without a taste of home, I feel kind of bad for not thinking of it before and tell Chef to start making it at least a couple days a week. Since I've also ordered my breakfast taken to my quarters tomorrow, she asks me if Rostov and Hess should be advised not to attend my private mess in the morning. I leave that to her discretion and convenience, and she tells me she would be pleased to serve them and will just have the steward tell them not to wait for me. I volunteer to carry the message for her, and head on down to the decommissioning bay to visit Rostov.

  "How ya doin', Chief?" Rostov greets me, handing me a PADD as I enter his domain.

  "Finer 'n frog hair, Mikey," I reply. Hess and Rostov and I have been together so long now that rank only matters between us when there is a difference of opinion. Then, I always win, since the ultimate responsibility for what we do falls on me.

  "That good, huh?"

  "You betcha." And I really am. Things are slotting into place nicely right now, and as long as they don't all turn sideways on me, I'll be doing just fine for a long while.

  I glance through the lists on the PADD, move a few items – a couple of IV pumps, a dozen hypo sprays, two medical hand scanners, some antibiotics and other drugs approaching their expiration dates and some random first aid supplies – from the 'salvage' to the 'scrap' column, and hand it back to him. He reviews my changes and looks at me with his poker face. I shrug, he nods, and I know that sometime in the night, the items in question will magically vanish from the ship and materialize in a cloaked cargo container on the far side of the gas giant that gives our station its name.

  It's just one of those not-quite-by-the-book operations I wanted to keep that news crew away from. I’ve never heard tell of a star ship running out of IV pumps, hypo-sprays, or medical scanners, and usually, when they run out of drugs and bandages, it's a futile effort anyway. We just sneak away a few things here and there and redirect them to the people in need who aren't getting the services and support the Empire promises. (In actual fact this quietly defuses a bit of the opposition to the Empire’s rule that might otherwise get a foothold, but we all know this approach wouldn’t go down too well with the Establishment.) Along with medical supplies, construction materials, winter clothes and bedding, we also acquire a few things we need to keep our venture running. We don't charge anything for the supplies or the service we offer, so it's technically not black market, but all of us involved know exactly what would happen to us if anyone ever found out. There's only one penalty for treason; it's always public, and neither swift nor pleasant.

  "I won't be at breakfast tomorrow," I tell him. "Chef is happy to have you an' Anna, though, so, just go ahead an' eat without me."

  "Something up, Chief?" he asks me.

  "Oh, Mikey, there's _always_ somethin'," I reply with a smirk that gets me a puzzled frown in return. "Walk with me. We're gonna see Anna."

  He calls over his XO, Julie Massaro, to give her orders before he leaves, and she shoots me a smile. She's another one from _Enterprise_ , and even though I didn't work with her very closely, I'm proud to think how many of my people have decided to stick together.

  Jupiter Station is big, big enough that Rostov and I don't actually _walk_ over to the Construction side to visit Hess; we take the turbolift up a couple of levels, take one of the glide ways over to the other pylon, and take the 'lift down to her office. I'm guessing Massaro gave her a heads-up after we left salvage, because she's ready for us when we get there.

  Hess favors clear spirits, so while I alternately sip from my shot of Tapatio Blanco 110 tequila and suck on a salted lime wedge, she mixes Rostov a rum and Coke (a luxury item we can get fairly easily out here since we're so close to Earth), and then pours herself a gin and tonic.

  Boozing is a ritual with Anna Hess. More than a social convention, it's a sort of communion, a meeting of like minds drawn together to find a few moments of rest and peace in one another's company. It's always accompanied by mood lighting (she's dimmed her office lights to 50% and closed the blinds) and classical music (I recognize ‘Truman Sleeps’ from the movie _The Truman Show_ , and Rostov asks if it's the ‘Moonlight Sonata _’._ It's a reasonable question. The pieces are similar. We've both learned a bit about music and booze from Anna _)._

  No one ever gets drunk when Anna is serving. For her, the whole point is to sample the alcohol, to know what makes one variety herbaceous and another fruity or minerally, and to understand what mixes well with citrus flavors versus what marries best with berries or bitters or vermouth. It's a completely different kind of socialization to ‘beer and wings’ with the guys at the 602 back on Earth, but if you're open to educating your palate and actually _tasting_ what you're drinking instead of guzzling your way into a good time, a fun night, a hangover, and maybe an awkward morning after, it really can be entertaining. Usually, she only pours you one drink, two at the most, if the gathering lasts more than an hour, and even then, only after everyone has finished their first round. Since Rostov is a total lightweight, I know I won't get another tequila tonight. Only after we're all three comfortably settled does it feel appropriate to tell them what I have in the works.

  "So, big news," I say. "Probably won't make either of you happy, Anna, you even less than Michael. Kelby's comin' back."

  Predictably, they both sit upright like offended cats, radiating indignation at the way I’ve let them down by allowing this to happen.

  "What?"

  "Chief!"

  "He did an interview with some news broadcast this week," I tell them. "He's in a position to get the attention of too many people who don't know the truth of what he likes to talk about. I have to deal with him, an' I have to do it now."

  "Salvage can be a pretty dangerous operation, Chief," Rostov suggests, settling back into his chair with a faint grin that reminds me worryingly of Reed.

  "We're due to initiate a new warp reactor next week," Anna says, picking up the theme. "Lot of untested plasma conduits that might leak."

  As touched as I am by their loyalty, I have to chuckle at their enthusiasm and shake my head. "I appreciate the thought, guys, but I'm not playin' that game anymore. The Empress an' I agree he's officially here for the mentorship an' trainin' I didn't have time to provide when we were so busy with the _Defiant_."

  I _never_ tell anyone that I have _told_ the Empress anything. Nobody _tells_ the Empress what to do.

  "OK, that's the official line," Hess acknowledges. If she was any sharper she’d cut herself. "What's the truth?"

  "The truth is exactly the same," I tell her. "I'm gonna give him every chance to succeed. He's gonna start with a little project Phlox asked me to undertake, an' if that goes well, Anna, I'm gonna put him under your command as a team leader. In a few months, if he actually turns out to be good for somethin', I'll place him in charge of buildin' the first of the new Daedalus-class ships. Then we'll kick his ass out of here as its chief engineer."

  They both goggle at me.  Hardly surprising – they know Kelby’s abilities as well as I do.

  "What?"

  "Chief! Kelby, building a _ship_?"

  "That's right!" I nod, giving them The Look so they know I’m not pulling their legs. "An' we're gonna hold his hands an' lead him through it just like teachin' a toddler to walk, an' Anna, I'm gonna tell him he can have anyone he wants as his XO, if he can convince 'em to work with him."

  "Chief!" This time she whines. The panic’s setting in good and proper, now. She knows she's the odds-on favorite.

  "I want you to play hard to get," I warn her. "Make him work a little to get you on board, but don't be impossible. I wanna know how he tries to tempt you. Whether he feeds you a line of shit or offers legitimate incentives."

  "I'd rather just say no," she sulks.

  "I know that, but you can survive workin' with him an' he's afraid to get fresh with you," I say. "An' you don't have to worry about him screwin' up, 'cause I'm ready to take the heat for that. After all, I did specifically request him to be transferred back here. _You_ just support him in every way possible. Keep a log of what you do, all your suggestions an' advice, an' what he does about 'em. Copy me daily. I'm gonna meet with him every day, an' I don't trust him to even know what he needs to bring up with me."

  She has the sense to think it over and I don’t press her.  She’ll trust me enough to go with it, even if she doesn’t like it. "I don't know, Chief. I think Michael's idea would be easier," she jokes.

  "I'm sure it would," I agree. "But I prefer to do the right thing. The way the world seems to work, the results will be about the same, an' if we do this the right way, there will be no questions from anybody about whether he had it comin'. So, we’re gonna proceed as if we have every intention of seein' him succeed, because bottom line is, that would be the best outcome for all of us."

  Once I’m satisfied that Kelby will have all the help he needs if he’s smart enough to use it wisely, I turn up Anna's music, gesture them both to move in closer, and add, "An' keep him the hell away from the salvage yard an' our other humanitarian projects, right?"

  "Yes, sir," they respond adamantly.

  On a whim, I propose a toast. "To Commander Richard Kelby," I say. "May he never disappoint!"

  "Hear, hear!" Hess and Rostov agree with a laugh. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. We expect him to fail and hope he succeeds. Whatever he does, we won't be disappointed.


	12. 11: Advocate (General Emilia Gomez)

  He is sleeping.

  The monitor assures me of this, or I would not be here.

  I was surprised when Lieutenant Cutler requested an interview with me.  _Francamente_ , I would have thought I was the very last person to whom she would have wished to speak.  I have a long memory, and it is more than long enough to remember _Enterprise_ , and the pitiful little _perra_ who cowered at Reed’s heels.

  Jealous?  I was not jealous.  She did not matter enough to be jealous of.

  She was pitiful, but she did not give in.  And she is still here.

  I was tempted to have them send her away.  I do not remember now why I changed my mind.  Maybe I was curious.

  It is one of the tricks of power to keep a _subordinada_ waiting.  I do not need such tricks.  I have the power, and so I simply watched steadily as she approached my desk and saluted.

  She had changed.  She had grown older, as had we all, but that was not the way in which she was different.  I waited to see what it was.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me, Ma’am,” she said.  I heard the quaver of nerves, but she steadied it.  She was wise to be afraid.  If she had been like this on _Enterprise_ , I would have killed her.

  I inclined my head.  “You wish to speak to me about The Project.”

  I do not call him by name.  That is over.  Sometimes, during the panting and the pleasure – yes, and the screaming – it went through my mind, but it is all like something long, long ago.

  She hesitated.  I watched her try to pick a way through the danger.  Finally, she wetted her lips and raised her head.  “Ma’am, I – I’m concerned,” she said.  “From a purely medical standpoint.”

  I allowed the pause to lengthen.  At last, and mildly, “I believe Doctor Phlox is a competent medical practitioner.”

  “I’m sure he is, Ma’am,” she replied quickly.  “But he – I’m worried that he hasn’t taken into account the degree of risk from leaving a patient catheterised for so long.”

  One raised eyebrow should have been enough to convey my displeasure at this idea.  “There is a risk?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” she said flatly.  “It's a direct line to the body's internal workings. The longer it remains in, the greater the risk of infection in the urinary tract.”

  I am well able to determine when a person is speaking with absolute confidence in their own _especialidad_.  The little Cutler was telling the truth – at least, as she saw it, and I perceived no reason to doubt her.

  The first pregnancy had ended badly, almost before it had well begun.  We would take no risk with this second one, which was still within the dangerous first few weeks.  Not that we were not prepared to try again, and again, and again ... as many times as were necessary.

_Screaming…_

  Infection ... infection was a risk.  No matter how small, it was a risk.

  I had often thought Phlox was a fool.

  I looked at Cutler thoughtfully, and wondered whether to kill her anyway.

  She has her uses.  Tucker visits her occasionally.  I watch them, but they are tediously shy.  When Reed had her she was never allowed to hide from the watching cameras; what does she think she has that everyone has not seen?

  _El Comodoro_ does not conceal what he does with T’Pol ... and others.  His face is still handsome, the part that was not damaged, and his body is still firm and fit. I know he is a skilled and creative partner.  Sometimes I have even contemplated summoning him to my own bed.  I think Alpha knows this.  He would watch, his head on one side, his blue eyes interested.  Maybe afterwards he would kill.

  “And one other thing I think I should mention, Ma’am.”  Her voice cut into my reverie, startling me.  “I understand you mean to keep ... keep the patient immobilised throughout the pregnancy?”

  I looked at her curiously.  She was on dangerous ground.  I wondered if she knew _how_ dangerous; and then I thought she did know, and my respect for her grew just a little, though perhaps I also felt a little more longing to kill her.

  “That is the plan, yes.” _¡Cielos!_   Did she think we could allow him to visit the gymnasium?

  Her lips pressed together.  “Then with respect, Ma’am, that’s also a risk.  He’s already been lying still for more than two months, and his muscle tone has started to deteriorate significantly.  The longer he stays there the worse it will become, and if he carries the baby to term he has to face giving birth to it – if that’s what you intend to happen of course.  If he stays where he is, it’s my professional judgement that if that _does_ happen, he will not survive it.  His body will be too weak to withstand the strain.  Quite probably his heart will fail.”

_“....Em...” he breathed – the last words of all..._

_Enterprise_ seems so very long ago now.  Much longer ago than it truly can be.

  (I remember Alpha’s long ivory body pressed against mine, his hand hard and possessive on my breast before it travelled to my flat belly and down further still.  His voice whispering in my ear:  _Breeding._

_Him or you._ He rolled on top of me.  His mouth covered mine.  His eyes, blue, at such close quarters... pleasure, piercing.  _Him or you._

  He surged inside me like the ocean, irresistible.  _Him or you._

  ... One day there was a question.  Idle, seemingly.  _What if_ he _wanted to breed?_

  There was no need of an answer; I knew it well enough.  There would be only one strong, male puppy in the nursery, though perhaps female full siblings might be allowed to survive, useful breeding stock. 

  Alpha licked my mouth sensually.  _At least this way he will live._ And I came around his thrusts, crying out and shuddering.)

  A faint sound from the bio-bed brings me back to the present. I have considered her request, but I thought I should look in on him before I make my final decision. He does not appear to be in any discomfort, but then, is that not the purpose of all the drugs Phlox is giving him – to prevent discomfort?

  Cutler is behind me.  She is wise enough not to presume; she has drawn the matter to my attention, and I will order her to do whatever I deem necessary.

  He is still asleep, but the monitor shows his brain patterns.  He is dreaming.

  I think from the softening of his mouth that it is a pleasant dream, and I am glad, for his sake.

  My mouth forms an endearment, but it is silent.  Better for both of us that it is.

  “There are plans in train to allow him some movement,” I say at length.  “We will have them brought forward.  In the meantime, do what you think best to prevent infection – and if Phlox protests, send him to me.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am,” she says quietly.  I am not sure if I am surprised to see that she has everything ready, and I watch as she performs the necessary procedure quickly and gently, with professional competence.

  Perhaps he is fortunate to have such a brave and compassionate advocate. _Posiblemente no_. _Depende_ , I think, on how badly he wants to live, whatever the cost. If he knew what was happening to him, would he forgive her for caring?

  I don't know.

  Regardless of his wishes, _I_ am grateful to her, though it would not do to show it.  Perhaps, for just a moment, we are two women, closer than we have ever been before or ever shall be again.

  But the world we live in does not allow for sentimentality.  Next moment she salutes, and I leave with no more than the proper nod of acknowledgement.  Tonight I will be in Alpha’s bed again, and even the last of these fleeting regrets will be gone.

  It will be better that way.

  Better for everyone.


	13. 12: Clean Slate (Commodore Trip Tucker)

  "Tell me, Richard…May I call you Richard?"

  He nods. I'm secretly glad he doesn't invite me to call him _Dick_. It might be a perfectly acceptable nickname for Richard, but I don't think I could say it without making it sound like an insult.

  "Exactly why do you think I brought you here?"

  "I don't know, Commodore." He's almost stupid enough that I'd believe him, if he just hadn't been so calculatedly clever in that damned interview.

  "Well, if you did know, what would the answer be?"

  "Sir?" He squinches up his eyes like he's having to think hard to follow the conversation. "I'm sorry, Commodore, I don't know why you brought me here, so what's the point in guessing?"

  "The point is, _Richard_ ," I'm surprised how much I manage to make it sound like _Dick_ , "you need to start thinkin' differently if you're ever gonna be chief of your own engine room. Sometimes, when there's a problem, a good engineer just has to start throwin' ideas at it till he finds a solution that sticks, an' sometimes, it's the craziest shit that actually works!"

  "Yes, sir, I know that. I've heard you say it more than once."

  He doesn't know what the hell's going on, so he's just going to agree with me and hope that's enough to keep him out of trouble. I try not to grin too hard as I shoot that fantasy all to hell.

  "I'm startin' to think you actually do get it, _Richard_ ," I tell him, and now that I've done it once, I can't help it. Every time I say his name it's gonna like _Dick_. "Take that interview you did about the _Defiant_ a couple weeks ago. The Empress an' I had quite a little talk about that. She was _not_ amused."

  "The- The _Em_ press?"

  His voice shoots up an octave on 'empress'. He knows he's in the shit now. I have to bite my tongue not to laugh.

  "Yeah, we spent about ten minutes talkin' about you. Do you have any idea how long _ten minutes_ is to someone as busy as the Empress?"

  He looks about ready to cry, and I don't blame him. Pissing off the Empress is a pretty good way to get yourself killed, or worse. Even I do my best to avoid it, especially now that things are running smoothly here at Jupiter Station and I'm a whole lot easier to replace. I might trust Hess and Rostov not to try pushing their way up, but that doesn't mean Hoshi won't sweep me aside if I don't keep her happy.

  "A-all I did was an-answer a few questions," he stammers.

  I honestly believe he didn't realize quite the degree of fuss he would create granting that interview, but hey, part of gambling is understanding the stakes you're playing for. He went all-in on the ante and now he's pissing himself because he has nothing left to bet.

  "You did a hell of a lot more than that, _Richard_ ," I press him. "Admit it."

  "All right!" he growls, finally dropping the pretense of innocence. "So I lied! I just wanted to screw with you a little. The story's always been 'Tucker Almighty! The man with the once-in-a-generation mind who found the key to the _Defiant_ and gave us the ship that would save the Empire. Hallelujah! Hail the conquering hero!' That project catapulted you up the ranks, and you took Hess and Rostov and Jenn Kelley, Tim Daniels, Julie Massaro, and hell, even Crazy Liz Cutler with you. Liz isn't even an engineer! _And you kicked me to the curb!_ Can you blame me for wanting to knock you down a few pegs?"

  The fact is, he's right. I just never considered at the time that he was smart enough to realize what was happening. Still, it doesn't change the fact that he screwed up big.

 I sit back in my chair and study him across my linked hands.  I’ve seen this done in the movies and always wanted to try it myself; and now I do, I understand better the sense of power-projection that comes with it.

  "Now that you put it that way, no, I don't suppose I can blame you." Really, I can, and in some ways I do, but that's not what he wants to hear. Nor will it drill through to him what I’m getting at, which is one _hell_ of a lot more serious than simply pissing off one of his senior officers. "Problem is, _Richard,_ the Empress appointed me to this post. She put me in charge of the Corps of Engineers. I am the man responsible for buildin' an' maintainin' the entire fleet, all of our ships, our space stations, our planetary installations, our weapons facilities, our minin' an' other resource extraction operations, an' our R 'n' D. When you lead people to question _my_ competence, you push 'em to question _hers_ as well. That is _sedition_ , my friend."

  He suddenly pales. Sedition is just another word for treason and treason's just another word for dead.

  "Oh, fuck," he breathes. I actually see sweat break out at his temples.  He may not have dealt with the Triad at close quarters, but their methods are very well known.  If Sato decides his ‘sedition’ should have consequences – and in the Empire, sedition _always_ has consequences – then he may have yet another visit from the MACOs shortly.  And this one may not end nearly as harmlessly as the last one did.

  "Got that right. Bet you're sorry about that interview now." I'm deliberately more cheerful than I should be.

  He swallows, whispers, "Yes, sir."

  "So apologize," I tell him.

  "Sir?" I’ve seen goldfish with these goggly eyes that some people with weird aesthetic tastes presumably think look cute.  Right now, Kelby wouldn’t look all that out of place in an aquarium himself.

  Up till now I’ve kept the threat I present to him hidden in velvet, but now I let the blade flash for just a second. "Goddamnit, Richard, _just apologize_!"

 It completes the job of scaring him into a quivering puddle of Jell-O.

  "C-Commodore Tucker, s-sir," he stammers, not really sure what to say or why he's saying it. "I…I apologize for what I said in that interview. It w-was…untrue and…inappropriate…and …and unfair to you."

  I know he's just making it up as he goes along because he's really sorrier for himself and the pickle he's in than he is for what he did to me. But he said the words and that'll have to do for now. We'll work on sincerity later.

  "Apology accepted, Commander Kelby," I tell him firmly, extending my hand. It's easy enough for me to bury the hatchet; after all, now that he's directly under my command, he won't be granting any more goddamn interviews!  "Consider this your first day on the job. You're startin' with a clean slate. Focus on showin' me what you got, an' I'm sure you'll do well."

  Actually, I'm _not_ all that sure. I know Kelby too well to be _anything like_ sure. It isn't possible to wipe the slate clean, and that's a big part of the reason I 'kicked him to the curb' years ago. But there's no harm in being optimistic. If I set him up for success and then let him go, he'll succeed or fail on his own merits. Whichever way he goes, I'll just be the man who forgave him his indiscretions and gave him one last chance to succeed.

  Recognizing when he just got handed a lifeline he should grab onto with both hands evidently isn’t one of Kelby’s skills.  He eyes my hand like he thinks there’s an electric contact in the palm, waiting to deliver lethal voltage the minute it’s touched. "Sir, I…"

  I just barely manage not to roll my eyes. _I'm extending you the hand of friendship when I could have just advised the Empress to execute you. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Take it, jackass!_

  He finally reaches out and grasps my hand, tentatively at first (waiting for the electric shock I guess) and then more firmly, with dawning relief. Did he read my mind or just have a glimpse of insight? I'll probably never know.

  "Thank you, Commodore! I won't let you down."

  "Glad to hear it, Commander," I tell him. "Now, let's talk about your first assignment."

=/\=

  “You mean like a _fish tank?”_ Kelby asks half an hour later.

  I restrain my first impulse to smack him upside the head for the way he’s complaining.  “Well, yeah, I suppose that’s sort of what they want,” I reply, reminding myself that it’s my fault he’s here and that if I want to improve things I’m going to have to have a heck of a lot of patience.  “But a lot more sophisticated, and I’ve just had orders they want it soon, so we haven’t got a lot of time to play with.  I want you to go over the specs from top to bottom tonight an' we’ll make a start on it first thing tomorrow mornin'.”

  The lard-ass takes the PADD and glances at the first diagram, still looking like he doesn’t know whether to burst out laughing or start whining that he didn’t enlist in the Corps of Engineers to start building an aquarium.

  “What the hell they want this for?” he demands.  “They thinking about keeping a shark in here, or what?”

  “Not our job to know what they want it for,” I answer, more sharply than I’d intended; every time I think about what it’s wanted for, guilt and horror squirm in my belly.  “I’ll give you a friendly tip, Richard," and finally, it doesn't sound like _Dick._ "Just do what you’re told an' don’t ask questions, or one of these days you’ll end up talkin’ to someone who’ll give you more answers than you want.”

  Well, yeah.  I know we’re all trying to play nice, but the memory of that interview he did and what it could have done to me if I hadn’t had the leverage I needed makes me smirk at the idea of how he’d shit his pants if he had to stand in front of Alpha and endure an interview with _him_.  What and who that guy is I don’t know, but I’ll admit it, he scares the bejeezus out of me.  His voice isn’t unpleasant to listen to and I’ve never heard him raise it – he doesn’t have to – but though his face is good-looking enough I suppose, it’s impossible to get your attention away from his eyes.  Presumably he _must_ wear contact lenses of some kind, because I can’t imagine that brilliant, iridescent, bottomless blue being natural. They make even Phlox’s eyes look downright dull.

  "You'll need a crew for this project, too," I tell him, "so start thinkin' about who you'll want workin' with you. It's a lot more complicated than just a big, watertight box. You need to think about what skills are needed, who has 'em, an' which of those people you'll get along best with."

  "You're letting me pick my own crew?" he asks in confusion.

  "It comes with bein' in charge of the project, Commander," I tell him. Did he seriously not know why I was giving him the specs to study?

  He stares at the PADD again like he’s trying to read the future in it.  I could save him the trouble: his future will be short and eventful if he messes this up.  But like I said, I’ll be held ultimately responsible if that happens, so I’ll be keeping a very close eye on whatever he gets up to.

  “Anyone I want?” he asks dubiously.

  “Anyone who’s up to the job.  That’s your first responsibility.  Study the schematics, decide which specialists you’ll need, pick ‘em, brief ‘em an' set ‘em to work.  An' keep a close goddamn eye on 'em to make sure they’re followin’ the specs.”  I pause; this is where I’m going to start changing the game, and I want to make sure he gets that I’m not joking.  “But one thing I want you to bear in mind.  You’re in charge, an' it’s your job to motivate your team.  An' I want you to do it by playin' nice – you say ‘please’ an’ ‘thank you’ an’ ‘well done’ when they deserve it.  You find out they’ve made an honest mistake, you show ‘em where they went wrong.  It's your job to teach them the way I'm tryin' to teach you.” I see him looking at me like he thinks I’ve lost my marbles, and the next thing he’s going to think is that I’ve gone soft.  I can’t be having that, so I continue in a harder voice, “You find out they’ve done shoddy work, you come down on 'em like a ton o’ bricks.  An’ if you find out they’ve deliberately sabotaged the damned project – you report 'em for sedition.”

  He gulps audibly as the ‘Tucker’s gone soft’ train of thought derails.  I hold his eyes just long enough to drive the message home good and proper, and then I tap the PADD.  “Now take this away an' study it.  I want you to come back here at 09:00 tomorrow an' tell me how you’re gonna proceed.”


	14. 13: Transition (General Malcolm Reed)

  “I think we’ve gone as far as we dare with the current regimen.”

  I don’t understand the words, of course, and he’s not talking to me.  The butterfly was very active this morning, and I don’t know what they’re feeding it but if it was up to me I’d put it on a bit of a diet.  Still, it’s nice to know one of us is getting plenty of exercise.  Now and again I get the shadowy feeling that lying here isn’t the most exciting thing in the world.

  “It will allow him stress-free exercise and relieve the pressure,” the doctor continues.  The small group of acolytes around the bed nod earnestly, but one of them leans forward a little and asks whether the _transition_ might not be very risky?

  The doctor nods judiciously, approving the foresight.  “It must be managed carefully, very carefully.  He’s not capable of understanding about the solution, of course.  He’ll have to be conscious, but we must take it very gently.”

  Well, that sounds kind of him.  Must be talking about that Patient chap they were on about ages ago.  I’d have thought he’d be out of here by now, if I’d thought about him at all.  Haven’t heard much about the Procedure lately either.

  Not sure I like the thought of that Transition though.  Not if it’s risky.  I’m glad it’s not happening to me.

  “Will he remain conscious afterwards?” someone else asks.

  This requires more consideration.  “We postulate there’s consciousness _of a sort_ ,” comes the eventual reply.  “Certainly there’s brain activity.  But it appears to be located in the ....” Blah, blah, he goes off into words that I don’t understand and my already tenuous interest in the proceedings fades out.  The only word I hear that lingers in my mind is _dreaming._

 _=_ /\=

  I’m not sure how many minutes have passed, but definitely not very many, when the slight jerk of the bed being moved wakes me from my usual half-doze.

  Instantly my heart rushes into my throat.  I haven’t done anything wrong, I’m sure of it, though I’ve no idea what I did wrong last time.

  Somebody adjusts the chemicals.  I’ve a big box beside me now, that apparently they can use rather than the bag they had at first; the doctor explained about it to someone one day when I was awake, so I don’t worry about it any more.  (Not that I can see much of it, except when they move me.  It has bright flickering lights of different colours and now and again I wish I could lie looking at them, because they’d be more interesting to look at than the ceiling all the time.)  So I’m not as nervous as I somehow think I ought to be as I’m wheeled out of the door, with the big box still alongside me – it must have its own set of wheels, like my bed – though I worry in case we leave the butterfly behind.  I’ve grown quite attached to it, and wouldn’t like it to have to wander about the place looking for me.

  They don’t turn me in the direction that I’m afraid they might, though.  We go the other way, but not very far, before they push me into another room.  Here there are several people waiting whom I don’t recognise, and lots of big interesting boxes with bright buttons and lights.  There’s one person there who seems strangely familiar, though, and I stare at him for as long as I can see him because something has happened to the side of his face and it must have been very painful, so I wonder if this is The Patient at last.

  “All ready,” he says shortly, moving out of my field of vision.  “Let’s get this done with.”

  The bed is moved to the middle of the room, and I feel it rising a bit as it goes, which is surprising but different. Someone removes my nappy and washes me, and I wonder when I began to wear nappies. I know it was some time ago, but I've no idea when. The wipes she uses are warm, so I know it's the Nice One. She spends a lot of time with me, and she's always very kind, so I like her a lot. Her touch is always gentle and the stuff she rubs into my wrists, ankles and head is always cool and soothing and never stings at all. She would never let anyone hurt me, so I know, whatever is happening, I'll be safe as long as she is here. Then a number of people surround me and take hold of the bedding I’m lying on and lift me, which is so unexpected I feel the almost uncontrollable urge to giggle.  Others are holding on tightly to the straps attached to my arms and legs, but they’ve had to unfasten the one around my head, and it hasn’t been replaced.

  After all this time it feels quite extraordinary to have nothing across my forehead and to be able to turn to look around me.  Even when the Nice One rubbed the soothing stuff into the skin up there, she held my head still with a hand in my hair for some reason. The freedom of movement feels so strange that for a moment I hesitate, but everything in this new room is so odd and fascinating that I can’t resist the temptation to just steal a quick peek.  And besides, I may finally be able to see my butterfly.  I’ve passed so many hours inventing its colours, I want to see if any of my guesses are right.

  Some of the people on one side seem to be doing something – I hear the squeak of wheels as if my bed is being wheeled away, though of course that’s ridiculous, because I’ll need to lie on it when they put me down again, won’t I?  Maybe someone ought to be keeping watch on where I’m looking, but they evidently aren’t, because I laugh and raise my head to see if I can see my butterfly.

  After that everything becomes very complicated and a lot of people are shouting, and everybody is trying very hard to keep me still and keep the bedding steady, while a sudden shrill wail of alarm from my box adds to the uproar.  I get one arm free and the person holding the bedding on that side lets go suddenly, so that still screaming I slide down towards where my bed ought to be and my weight tears the straps out of everyone else’s hands and I’m falling, falling onto the fl–

 _Water._ Except that it’s not water, it’s pink and warm and it tastes peculiar, and I flail around in it wrapped up in my bedding which has come into it with me, and I can’t tell which is the right way up, which is terrifying as my head’s under the water and I didn’t take a very deep breath when I fell in.  I fight my bedding and I fight the water and my fists and feet bang against the sides, but my arms and legs are so weak I can’t break anything or tear anything, and the air is going out of my mouth and nose as I thrash and scream.  Vaguely I can still hear shouting, but it’s going further and further away behind the buzzing in my ears.  All my air is gone and the pain in my chest is so great I have to breathe, but there’s nothing but pink water and I’m going to drowndrowndrowndrow–

  The pink water rushes into my nose, my mouth, my throat; I try to swallow it, to drink it, but it goes into my lungs and the shock of the pressure is so great I arch like a bow, waiting for the darkness to envelop me.

  But it doesn’t.

  Instead, calm comes.

  The bedding loosens its malevolent, all-encompassing grip of my body.  I float, still, submerged, wondering, feeling the cautious tugs from above detach it from around me and drag it up.

  Finally it’s gone.  I’m free.  The only important thing that still seems to be attached to me is the tube that leads from my hand, though I’m vaguely aware that there are other tubes and wires that go elsewhere.  This is the one that connects me to my box, and by the way that I drift, almost comatose, as hands cautiously reach down and unfasten the straps around my wrists and ankles, the lights on the box must be winking very busily indeed.

  There was something that frightened me, but I don’t remember what it was.  I’m floating like a fish, and even the slightest movement sends me wafting through the pink water so that I bump against the sides and drift away again.  This amuses me for a while, but soon I become tired.  It is very hard work to move my arms and legs again after so long, and feels very strange.

  Idly I move myself to the top of the pink water, where once again I bump gently to a halt.  There is a glass cover, which fits absolutely neatly except where there are little holes for the cables and tubes to pass through.  There is no air-space; it’s filled to the brim with pink water.  This should worry me, but it doesn’t, because I still appear to be breathing, however unlikely this may be.  It takes a bit of effort, but it works.

  I can see people beyond.  They are _still_ shouting; I can hear their voices distantly, and as I peep anxiously through the glass, trying to understand what everyone is so upset about, I see the doctor's face has blown up like a balloon – if he was looking at me this would be terrifying, but luckily he is staring at someone else.  Everyone seems to be yelling and gesticulating.  I hope they are not angry with me, but I am becoming too tired to care.

  Just one person out of them all is not arguing.  She is standing to one side, and though of course she is just looking at the tank, I pretend she is looking straight at me.  Her eyes are huge and shiny with tears, and though it's difficult to be sure as everything outside is now in shades of pink, I suspect that if I could see her face in its natural colour, it would be absolutely white.

  For some reason, I think she might be worried for me, though I can't imagine why. I wish that I could somehow communicate to her that I am fine, because I don't like seeing her so upset.

  Then there is a tickle at my wrist, and I forget about her. I stop looking.  I stop listening.  I turn over, and my body drifts slowly into a gentle curve as it sinks to the bottom of the tank.

  I wait for the dreaming.

 


	15. 14: Confrontation (Ensign Elizabeth Cutler)

_ He's okay. _

My legs are almost trembling underneath me.

I thought we'd lost him – I thought for sure we'd lost  _it_. I don't know how I bit back the scream as I watched him slide helplessly into the tank, his face twisted with terror. That said, I don't suppose anyone much would have noticed, even if they'd been able to hear me in the pandemonium. Pretty well everyone was yelling and cursing and he was screaming and the monitor was going berserk – responding to the soaring levels of stress hormones in his body, which of course are the worst thing possible for the fetus.

Even after the chaos had subsided and the readings said everything was okay, Phlox was in a killer of a mood – not surprising, really, given that he'd have been held chiefly, if not solely, responsible for a miscarriage under these circumstances. I don't think we'll be seeing MacEvoy around the medical facility again, and the way Phlox was talking I wouldn't be sure we'll be seeing him again, period. There's no way in hell the story of what happened won't get out, and somebody will want a victim. I can't imagine what Alpha and Em actually feel for Malcolm, but they sure as hell don't want him damaged, and another miscarriage so much further on in a pregnancy would be a lot riskier. Even without taking into consideration all the effort that's gone into maintaining it this far, and the amount of hope they must be pinning on it now.

MacEvoy was the guy who panicked and let go, letting Malcolm fall into the tank rather than being lowered into it gently, so he's the one whom Phlox will undoubtedly throw under the bus. Even before we finished up for the day it was noticeable that nobody spoke to him – nobody even went near him if they could help it, like disgrace was a communicable disease. He knows what's coming, too. I had to speak to him twice when I asked him to double-check the readouts on the filtration system, and even then he looked like he hardly knew what he was staring at.

But Malcolm….

I made an excuse to stay behind afterwards, saying I wanted to monitor his pulse for a while. I didn't take any notice of the knowing glances, the sneers – I've faced them all before and they don't bother me.

Finally it's quiet. I sit beside the tank, just watching him. Part of me wonders what he would find more humiliating, the diapers or floating like a goldfish in the same pool of fluid where he relieves himself. Of course, just like a fish tank, the solution contains chemicals that neutralize the toxic compounds and it's filtered. I didn't understand a word Trip said when he explained to me how Commander Kelby managed to fine-tune the filtration system to process 500 liters every ten minutes without producing a noticeable current, but I could tell he was proud and surprised. I was pleased just to know it would benefit Malcolm.

Malcolm…

Who now lies at the bottom of the tank, bathed in soft pink light, so relaxed it would be easy to believe he is dead; but the monitors attached to him are still beeping softly and reassuringly, and now and again he twitches just a little. Occasionally, a smile creeps across his face, and makes it look so different – softening all the hard lines, and making him look so vulnerable that without thinking I put a hand against the glass, wishing I could touch him.

He looked at me, before he fell asleep. After what he's been through, the stress and terror must have been absolutely exhausting so it's probably inevitable that he needed to recover from it, but just before the tiredness and the drugs took effect, I watched him staring out of that damned tank, so clearly trying to understand what was happening, so battered and afraid. And then just for a second, I swear he looked at me – looked, like I was someone he wanted to know was there. Like I was someone he had one tiny little fragment of trust in.

" _Christ!"_

The expletive behind me almost makes me jump out of my skin.

"Trip!" I could smack him upside the head for giving me such a scare. "For heaven's sake, did you have to creep up on me like that?"

He'd be well within his rights in giving me a dressing-down for using his nickname rather than his rank, because we're both still in uniform and he's several ranks above me. Come to think of it, I've no right to criticize him at all, let alone accuse him of creeping up on me. Fortunately there's only the two of us in the room, which probably allows him to overlook it (though with others present I'd get the blistering reprimand my mistake deserved), but then I see immediately that his attention isn't really on me at all. It's fixed on the tank and the man inside it, and it's easy to perceive that for all he undoubtedly saw the specs and signed off on the completion of it, actually seeing it in action is a whole new kettle of fish. The reflection of the pink glow makes his face look healthy, but I guess without difficulty that it's actually gone pale. He moves closer and stares at the naked monster in the tank, wired up and unconscious, with the unnatural bulge of the pregnancy now plainly visible.

"Quite something else, isn't it, Commodore?" I say, my voice hard. "I'm sure you'll say he had it coming."

He swallows something in his throat. "You're – you're sure he's still alive?"

"Absolutely sure." I point to the nearest monitor. On it the slow, low waves of Malcolm's brain activity indicate he's moved out of REM sleep; earlier on they were busy, and I sat here wondering what he was doing, and where he thought he was.

I know, I know, it's completely irrational to feel jealous of a dream. But I spent so much time watching the news feeds, breaking my heart every time he appeared – especially in company with Em or Alpha. It was obvious to me how much he loved them. Even though I'm quite sure he'd have denied it with his dying breath if asked, his whole body language proclaimed it. And I truly believed they felt something for him too,  _something_  – though when I think of what they've done to him now I have to wonder if that love wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to him.

_ Dreaming _ , Phlox said. Was he with them again, happy again, confident and powerful? A thousand light years from this nightmare he's trapped in, where the world has turned on its head and betrayed him utterly?

"Have they seen him?" Trip's voice is rusty, as though he's finding it hard to speak. He doesn't say who 'they' are; he doesn't have to.

"There's a video feed set up." I point into the nearest high corner. "They can see him whenever they want." The light beneath the lens is off, but earlier it was on, a bright point of green in the shadows.

I don't know whether it's the horror of watching what I've been unable to prevent, or the anguish of wondering, but suddenly I want to rend him for being a part of all this. It hardly matters that for all his rank pips he's probably almost as powerless as I am; he should be happy now, he's won, he's alive, he's free, and Malcolm is a  _thing_  floating in a tank, even the dignity of thought stripped away from him. I feel the tears smash out of my eyes, and it's all I can do to stop myself from flying at the Empire's Chief Engineer and doing my damnedest to beat the living daylights out of him. Maybe the only thing that stops me is the knowledge of the other cameras, because here just as everywhere else the surveillance is constant; and the orders are that everything in the room is to be calm and quiet, because there's no saying when the patient may drift into partial consciousness and if that happens he's not to be scared by anything he sees or hears.

"Why the hell should you care if they've seen him or not?" I ask, my voice trembling with passion. "You always hated his guts. Remember that day you did your damnedest to break every bone in his hand? I think there were only two still in one piece by the time you'd finished. It took four operations to get his arm functional again. I should think there's practically no-one on this station who would care less to see him like this!"

Unmistakably, anger flashes into his eyes. "What the fuck sort of heartless sonofabitch do you think I am?"

I point accusingly at the tank. "You knew what this was for as soon as you saw it!"

"So what, Liz? So what if I did? What the fuck was I supposed to do, say 'No, I think it's sick, find someone else to do it'?"

"I could have respected you if you had!"

"There wouldn't be anything  _left_  of me for you to respect!" He knows he's in the wrong, of course, so he flies into a temper. "You know what would have happened? They'd have gotten rid of me an' brought someone else in who had the sense to do what he was told! It wouldn't have made one blind bit o' difference to what Major Malfunction here was gonna have done to him. Oh, except that havin' someone in charge who doesn't have my expertise might make it a whole lot more likely he'd fuckin'  _drown_  in there!"

"So, you just kept your mouth shut to make sure you stayed in charge for  _his_ welfare!" Now I'm the one who's in the wrong and I know it, but that doesn't help me to stop.

"I kept my mouth shut to make sure I stayed in charge for the sake of all the goddamn people who're findin' life a whole lot nicer on this station than it used to be!" he snarls. "When I came to this place it was worse'n a nest o' snakes, an' I've put years o' work into gettin' it as good as it is. An' I'm not puttin' all my hard work in danger for the sake of a little bastard who'd shoot me sooner'n look at me. An' if that don't make me a hero, well, I'm sorry to trample on your illusions!" With which he storms out of the room, not giving a second glance to the tank or the man inside it.

I turn and look back at Malcolm, sleeping peacefully at the bottom of the tank, and wonder if I've done him any good at all. For the first time, I let myself wonder if he wouldn't sooner die than live like this, and I realize the answer to that question depends on whether there's any hope of escape. Nothing I've done has brought him any closer to escaping this hell; it's only ensured he'll stay a bit healthier in it, last a bit longer.

My god. What have I done?


	16. 15: A Taste of Home (Commodore Charles Tucker)

 

  I’m still pissed off as I walk back to my quarters.

  I suppose I hadn’t realized till Liz popped off at me just how it would look from her point of view.  Having a mirror held up to your own conduct isn’t always a comfortable experience, but it’s one that I’m getting kind of used to around here, and especially around _her_.

  There's a limit, goddamnit! Maybe not a limit to my hate, but certainly a limit to what any man, any living creature no matter how loathsome, should be asked to endure. I could have happily stomped Reed to death in the access tube of the _Defiant_ after the Gorn blew him up, or I could have done it with equal pleasure right here in my shuttlebay the day we captured him. But at least he would have been dead, and he would have died a man _,_ a _human being,_ for God's sake. This … this emasculating, this _dehumanizing_ … experiment … It's just _so fucking wrong_.

  And it's more than I can endure.

  I almost stop in mid-stride as that realization comes to me.

  I haven’t gotten to where I am in the Empire by not knowing exactly where the ‘Stop’ signs are.  And the one that flashes up in front of me now at the first _hint_ of what I’m thinking is about twelve meters square – and flashing neon red, just in case I might not notice it otherwise.

  This situation has been deliberately and carefully engineered by the two people who are currently the most powerful couple in the Empire.  They’re not known for their forgiving natures at the best of times, and I’m actually thinking about throwing a wrench in the works of their pet project. And for what? The sake of the guy who tried to kill me back on _Enterprise_ and would now cheerfully feed me into a meat grinder a millimeter at a time if he got the chance? No, he’d probably think that was way too quick and easy.

  So presumably my suicidal impulse isn’t on _his_ behalf.

  Well.  Liz is obviously pissed off with me, and I’ll admit it rattled me some to find out just how much she's been holding against me, waiting for the right time to get it all off her chest and drop it square in my lap.  She’s so small and secretive it’s easy to underestimate how much power there can be in a relatively miniature machine; and she doesn’t usually let on what she’s feeling quite that freely.  But though I suppose I don’t like the feeling that a woman I normally think of is a friend actually thinks I’m lower than a rat’s ass, I’m not sure that I’d commit suicide just to put a smile on Liz Cutler’s pasty little face.

  I sigh at myself as the ugliness of that thought dawns on me. I’m being unfair. I'm pissed at her because she's pissed at me, but she's not an unattractive woman. She's actually quite pretty when she smiles.

  Anyone else?  I shake my head.  I haven’t told T’Pol what’s going on, but I’d guess the only reason she’d go in there would be to piss in the tank.  I can’t imagine any of my engineers would have any reason to think any better of him, and his own MACOs don’t seem to realize yet that anything’s wrong – which I only now find peculiar and have to wonder how they could go four or five months now without noticing that their top man is MIA.

  On _my_ behalf?

  Jeez, give me a break.  I like my skin attached to the rest of me rather than flayed off and draped around the main shuttlebay as a reminder to any visitors of the dangers of dissension.

  So what the hell am I even thinking along these lines for?

  The words come back to haunt me.  _It’s just so fucking wrong._

  ‘Wrong’.

  The whole Empire is wrong, sick and cruel and twisted.  Liz told me that often enough, mostly on nights when she was hitting the bourbon pretty hard in an effort to get over the sick, cruel, twisted bastard who’d fucked her and forgotten her.  We kind of forget to notice because that’s the way it’s always been, but there was a time when I knew right from wrong, when I always tried to do the right thing and you'd have a hell of a fight trying to _make_ me do something I knew was wrong. That all ended shortly after newly-promoted Rear Admiral Black got hold of my aptitude test scores and recruited me into the Imperial Fleet right out of high school. I was seventeen years, six months, and one day old, as young as you can possibly be to enlist without parental permission.

  I’d told Black that my folks wouldn't sign the release forms, but the fact is, I never asked them. I was already playing the game and never realized it. I knew Mama and Daddy would have had all kinds of questions about why I'd changed my plans from college to enlistment. If it had just been Daddy, I might have managed it, but I could never lie to Mama. Once she and Daddy found out about the threats Black had made, Daddy especially would have wanted to stand up to him. I don't think he'd have figured out until it was too late that, with five more children coming up behind me, he had too much to lose to go up against an officer of the Imperial Fleet. So, I lied to the admiral that they wouldn't sign the papers, got an extra six months and one day with my family, Mama and Daddy got one hell of a disappointment when I abandoned all our hopes and dreams of college, and Black's lackey Max Forrest got the best engineer of my generation to run his starship (even if it is bragging for me to say so myself).

  I learned quick, maybe too damned quick, that you take the Empire on its own terms or it eats you alive, and you play by the rules only until there’s a chance you can get away with breaking them and snatch some tiny little advantage that means you live and the other guy doesn’t.  Except for the few at the top, life’s hard and short and miserable, lived out with one eye forever looking over your shoulder and the other fixed on the crap shoot. For those at the top, of which I am one now, it might be a little easier and last a little longer, but it tends to end pretty damned abruptly and usually unexpectedly.

 _What the hell am I thinking?  Fuck, I’m just an engineer. As wrong as things are around here, nobody expects me to martyr myself, especially not for_ _a vicious little asshole like Reed and a loser like Cutler._

  She loved him.  Still does, and _you_ tell _me_ why, because that doesn’t change what he is – a twenty-four-carat psycho killer, with a history of torture and rape and murder that’d burn out a PADD if ever anyone dared make a record of it. Makes me wonder if Liz ever thought about what it says about her to be capable of loving someone like that, and if I think about it hard enough, it makes me wonder if maybe she isn't one of the best people I know after all.

  Apparently, I'm still more pissed off than I realize when I enter my quarters because T'Pol cowers back on the corner of the bed, watching me with wide, fearful, dark eyes.

  "Ah, what's your problem?" I demand harshly. "We both know you're strong enough to pound me down to the consistency of grits an' gravy if you ever took a mind to."

  As I unfasten the chain that binds her to my bed, she sits there unmoving, staring at me like a wary cat, and I’m struck by the similarities between her and Cutler. Two women, both enslaved to men who treat them as little more than animals; Liz choosing it because she loves him, T'Pol, what? Accepting it because she could do worse?  So she could, but what does that say about me?

  "Hurry up in there," I growl as she slips past me into the toilet. "I need a shower."

  I feel completely filthy, and I only spent the day reviewing reports. I sit on the edge of a chair because it feels like the touch of me is soiling it, and glare at my nails like I expect to see crap wedged underneath them.  They’re perfectly clean of course, but that doesn’t make me feel better.  Not even a little bit.

  T'Pol comes out of the bathroom in just a couple of minutes and stands there waiting for a cue from me to tell her what she ought to do.  After a couple of moments I realize this is completely normal for her, and I have no answer to the question of why it suddenly annoys me so much.

  "Get me some clean clothes," I snarl as I push past her. "An' try to stop lookin' so fuckin' scared, would you?"

  The water's as hot as I can bear to make it and I scrub from head to toe, hard enough to hurt, but I can still feel the dirt when I step out of the shower. It's _under_ my skin, or part of it like some godawful fungal growth, and I don’t know what I can do to get rid of it.

  I dress in the clothes T'Pol has placed neatly on the counter for me, plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a soft cotton T-shirt. Does she know these are my favorite clothes for relaxing, or did she just choose them because she's seen me wear them so often?

  She's curled up on the corner of the bed when I come out, but she stands up immediately, ready for orders; this is usually the time when I decide whether I’m heading for the Mess Hall or joining her in bed for whatever games I happen to feel like playing tonight first.  Scowling, I wave her back down on to the bed and sit at my desk with my back to her, thinking about what I'm going to do next. I know what I want to do, I need to do it, but I dread it just a little.

  While I sit there cogitating (stalling, actually, if I only admit it to myself), she finds some previously unknown depths of courage and rises to stand behind me. I see her reflection in the monitor and ignore her. I hear her hands rubbing together, and even though I know what's coming, I’m more than a little surprised when she finds the nerve to place her hands on my shoulders in Position One of the Vulcan neuropressure routine she uses to help me sleep.

  There was a time when I'd have knocked her across the room and beaten her until she couldn't move for daring to touch me without permission. Tonight, I can't justify that, even if, by the rules of the Empire, I'd be within my rights to kill her for no greater cause than my own amusement.

  I shrug my shoulders and nudge her away with my elbow.

  "Not tonight," I growl.

  The truth is, I don't want to feel better about this. I don't want to relax. I want to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do.

  I snap my fingers and point at the armchair in the corner. T'Pol obediently moves to sit there, where she will be off-camera when I place my call.

  I put my security protocol in place and enter a familiar code. It isn't a minute before someone answers.

  Mama’s voice soars an octave with pleased excitement on the first sentence.

  "Trip, darlin', how are you?" and before I can answer, she says, "Let me get your father."

  Communications from out here on active service for the Imperial Fleet aren’t exactly regular or frequent. Even though Jupiter Station isn't that far from Earth – a starship could get me there in less time than it would take me to walk from my quarters to the ship – most of the subspace comm. channels are reserved for military business only with just a fraction of a percentage of the bandwidth being allotted to personal communications.  Of course, this being an unauthorized call, I'm using one of the old diplomatic frequencies (from back in the day when the Empire still _practiced_ diplomacy), unmonitored, but heavily encrypted. Still, even if I could technically call home every night, the more I use my secret channels, the greater the chance that they'll stop being _my_ secrets.

  Even though she covers the microphone, I can plainly hear Mama holler, "Charlie! Get out here! It's Trip."

  Behind her on the kitchen island, I see a coconut cake on the antique glass cake plate Granny Tucker gave them as a wedding gift. One of us kids busted the domed cover years ago, but Daddy found a suitable replacement at a flea market a few months later. There's a loaf of homemade bread on the counter by the toaster and a jar of mayonnaise, a head of lettuce, and a plate of sliced tomatoes beside it. I see the old cast-iron skillet on the cook top with the bacon press at the ready, and I realize it must be about lunch time. Mama's getting ready to make BLTs. Suddenly the taste of them is in my mouth, so real that it sets the saliva running.

  "Hey there, son!" Daddy greets me and takes a seat beside Mama. 

  "Daddy. How you doin'?"

  "I'm fit as a fiddle an' fine as wine," he preens, ignoring the fact that there are more gray hairs at his temples than there used to be.

  My father. And people think _I_ like to brag. If I do, I sure know who I got it from.

  Mama looks him up and down, gives him the hairy eyeball and replies, "That's entirely a matter of opinion, old man."

  Daddy harrumphs, Mama chuckles, and I laugh aloud even though I feel like crying. Calling them like this is hard, because I always miss them even more after we've talked.

  One of the ways the Imperial Fleet controls its people is by cutting them off from everyone who cares about them. I knew when I enlisted that it would hurt my parents to have me dump all the plans we had been making together since I was a child, but I had no idea it would be _ten years_ before I got to tell them I was sorry. I was allowed one ten-minute call after the incident that destroyed my face, just to let them know I had been hurt but would survive; rumors get around, and I knew they’d most likely hear something and worry. At the time, most people didn't even get that, but having been hand-picked by Admiral Black to be his boy Forrest's pet engineer and the chief of his engine room, I received the occasional special privilege.

  When Empress Sato put me in charge of Jupiter Station after my team got the first new _Defiant_ -class ship in service, I got an allotment of sixty minutes a month for personal calls. The time is use-it-or-lose-it, but with my parents and four living siblings, it's easy math. I can call each household and talk for ten minutes, and I save ten minutes in case one of my people has an emergency. At the end of the month, if I still have time left, I give it to whichever one of my engineers is next in line for the perk. Eloise keeps track of the list for me, and everybody gets their time when it is their turn. It's not an award for outstanding achievement or an incentive to work harder; it's me acknowledging that they all make a contribution and deserve to be rewarded for their efforts. I also make damned sure _everyone_ permanently stationed here gets to contact their loved ones, if not frequently, at least regularly, even if it's only once or twice a year.

  When we have people coming in for their six-week training rotations, they get twenty minutes of personal call time. I don't know how many of the young kids I meet here got into the Fleet the same way I did, or even the senior engineers for that matter, but I'm determined to see to it that they get the chance to set things straight with their folks before they ship out. There's no telling how many of them will be dead before they get another chance to call home.

  Since the Empress allowed the unusual level of personal communication passing through my station, I never felt the need to consult the Trio of Terror, and now that the balance of power has shifted, I sure as hell won't mention it to the Demonic Duo. If they ever find out and they're displeased, well, I have Hoshi's permission. It was her mistake. I know that might be cold, but she seems to enjoy subverting them in little ways, and she should know the risks of her actions better than anyone.

  "Trip, baby, what's the matter?" Mama asks.

  "Elaine..." Daddy says warningly, and I feel like I'm seventeen again, keeping my secret from them, just waiting for the day I turn seventeen and a half plus one day.  This probably isn’t doing my status in T’Pol’s eyes any favors, hearing my mama call me ‘Trip, baby’, but right now the sense of home is something I badly need – too badly to care what my sex-slave thinks of me.

  Probably having her in the room while I’m going to be saying what’s on my mind isn’t the smartest call either.  There are always ways and means, and the reward for snitching on me after this … well, put it this way, her slavery might soon be a thing of the past. I glance at her, hard, but for some reason I decide to risk it.

  "No, Daddy, Mama's right," I admit. "I … need some advice. That's why I'm callin'."

  Mama shoots him a 'see there?' look and he gives her a playful scowl.

  It takes me a moment to start; even now I’m kind of feeling my way into the whole thing.  "You two always taught me to do the right thing," I tell them, speaking slowly and carefully. "How far does that go?"

  "Well, what do you mean, son?"

  I should have thought this through before I called; my hesitation’s probably worrying them. T'Pol shifts silently on the chair and I feel my face flush as I realize I’m talking to my parents on a vid call with a naked sex-slave hidden in the corner of my quarters.

  "The man who did this to me," I gesture toward my ruined face and force myself to focus on the question at hand, "is in a whole boatload of trouble, Daddy."

  He considers that, frowning.  In the Empire, trouble’s never far round the corner, and he knows of old that it spreads like wildfire. He served in the Imperial Fleet, back in the day when enlisting was a four year commitment and you could return to civilian life if you managed to survive that long. "Did he bring it on himself?"

  It takes me a long time to answer, mostly because I'm not sure if the answer is a yes or no.  Out of the screen, my parents’ faces watch me intently.

  "Well … he deserved … a whole lotta somethin'," I answer, but then I pause, remembering the horror of that helpless body floating in the tank of pink goo whose construction I’d helped supervise. Then it all comes out in a rush, the things I don't want to tell them because they'll be disappointed in me and the things I don't want Mama to hear because it'll break her heart to know how hard and cruel life is out here and just how well I have adapted to it.

  "I'm ashamed to tell you that I'd have killed him myself a couple different times if someone hadn't stopped me," I confess, "but what's happenin' to him now … Daddy, it's just _wrong_. I still hate him, an' part of me wants to see him pay an' pay hard for what he's done. He's a bad man, an' he's hurt a lot of people a lot worse than he hurt me, but killin' him would have been kinder than what's bein' done to him now."

  "Well, son, if he's bein' punished for somethin' he did, it's just the consequences of his bad behavior.”  Mama’s voice takes on a stern note.  “He should have to face up to them, an' if he can't, then he shouldn't have done whatever he did." She’s not unkind, but she can sense where this is going, and the danger to me if I even try to interfere isn’t something any mother would want for their son – or daughter either.

  My hands are loosely linked on the desk in front of me.  They’re as clean now as soap and water can make them, and they still feel dirty. _I_ still feel dirty.  "If he was bein' punished, Mama, I'd agree with you," I say, "but what you don't understand is that sometimes, in the Imperial Fleet, powerful people do cruel things just because they can. He isn't _bein'_ punished. He's bein' _hurt_. As part of–” I look at T’Pol and change my mind about saying anything more; the territory I’m already in is dangerous enough. “An' it may be in my power to stop it, but not without endangerin' myself an' possibly other good people who work with me."

  "I don't know what to tell you, Trip." A frown of worry is bitten into Daddy’s forehead. "You've got a hell of a problem, son."

  "Yessir, that's why I'm askin' for advice."

  "Well, from what I gather, you're a big shot up there. People look to you for leadership," he says. "If you're good at your job, when you make up your mind, they'll follow you."

  "Charlie," Mama hisses at him, "it could be _dangerous_ for him to get involved."

Daddy looks down at her and kisses her hair. "I know that, sweetheart, but sometimes..." _Sometimes you’ve got to do what’s right, as opposed to what’s safe._

  He looks back at the vid screen, back at me, and says, "I guess it all comes down to the kind of world you want to live in, son. The thing is, if you're gonna call somethin' a crime, you don't get to pick an' choose the victims. Either everybody, even the bad guy, is entitled to protection, or nobody is. It's not a question of who you help, Trip, it's a question of whether you're the man to put a stop to this particular crime."

  Am I, though?  I ponder the question long after I’ve closed the conversation, assuring both of them that I won’t take a single unnecessary risk. (It goes without saying that they won't discuss a word of this call with anybody, not even my brothers and sisters).  Am I the sort of fool who’ll risk a good job and his career, not to mention his life, for the sake of a vicious little bastard I don’t even care about, one who’d gleefully murder me with his bare hands if he got hold of me for five seconds?

  Vulcans have exceptionally good hearing.  I’m quite sure that T’Pol heard every word I said, and though she’s wise enough to keep her mouth shut I catch her sidelong glances.  No doubt she’s got her own opinion, but right now it’s not her thoughts I want.  Suffocating the thought of what Mama would think of my behavior right now, I snap my fingers and gesture her to the bed.  She’s a failed rebel, a convicted criminal, and I’m her punishment.

  Distraction will do just fine.

 


	17. 16: The Dreaming (General Malcolm Reed)

_It is_ Enterprise _._

_It is_ Enterprise _and yet it is not_ Enterprise _, for the uniforms are wrong.  This is the first thing I notice, for the women are dressed exactly the same as the men.  It seems so strange to see a woman without her midriff exposed that I pause as she draws level with me; and stranger still, instead of flinching or even jerking to a halt, she simply smiles at me and walks past, as though she is not afraid of me in the least.  I turn and look after her, and she does not look back nervously or hurry away. I do not know what to make of it at all._

_The Mess Hall.  There are not many people there, and none of those who are seem to pay any attention to my arrival.  Except one:  Sergeant Mayweather, who for some reason is wearing a blue flight uniform instead of the grey camo and black vest of a MACO. He is seated in front of a chess board at one of the tables, and looks up and waves me over.  His smile is so bright it is almost unrecognisable.  “Hey, Lieutenant!” he calls.  “I’m going to beat you tonight.  I swear, tonight it’s going to happen.  I feel lucky.”_

_I’m not sure who he’s addressing as Lieutenant, but it’s been so long since I played a game of chess that didn't involve living, breathing pawns that I decline to remind him that my rank aboard_ Enterprise _was that of Major.  Instead I drop into the chair opposite him and lay out my pieces.  A couple of the other diners have heard his braggadocio and quips fly thick and fast; someone even claims to have seen a pink pig fly past the viewing port.  Mayweather accepts them all with unfailing good nature, beaming as he sets the auto-timer for the game.  His whole mien is so utterly at odds with the sullen glower with which he’d always confronted me across the board in the past that I have difficulty in believing it’s actually the same person at all._

_At any rate, his chess skills aren’t significantly different, except perhaps that this smiling version plays with a little more dash and a little less calculation – almost as if he’s playing for fun.  He doesn’t beat me and he doesn’t care in the least; on the contrary, when I finally tap the base of his king with my rook and applause bursts from those who’ve gathered to watch and deride the crash of his hopes, he smiles so hugely that you’d think he’d won a tournament final, and reaches across to shake hands and congratulate me._

_“I had you worried at one point, though, admit it!” he laughs._

_“Definitely,” I reply.  “I was worried you weren’t even going to last ten minutes.”_

_I don’t think I’ve ever heard people laugh like that before at something I’ve said.  Not as though it was genuinely funny, as opposed to because they were too scared not to._

_It’s at this point it occurs to me that I’m dreaming.  That this is all something I’ve read about somewhere, but that I’m living it as though it’s actually me._

_This idea is so interesting that I decide to carry on and see what else happens to me.  I drink some tea and eat a few crackers topped with cheese, and am just about to stand up when someone puts down a plate in front of me.  It’s a piece of cake, sponge cake with a circle of pineapple stuck in the top and a glistening cherry stuck in the middle of it.  “Don’t tell me I never do anything for you, Lieutenant.” Sato drops a spoon and fork beside the plate, and grins down at me.  “That was the last piece, and Anna was just making a bee-line for it.”_

_“You saved her from getting put on report,” I say, trying not to make it obvious that I’m looking around a bit wildly to see who Anna may be.  Fortunately an attractive woman by the dessert cabinet is pulling a face at Sato, and I realise she’s referring to that sour-faced bitch Hess whom Tucker’s training up.  Hess puts a piece of carrot cake on her tray instead and walks away with a pretend flounce, grinning._

_“Thank you.” I glance up at Sato a bit uncertainly._

_She smiles down at me and actually winks.  “My pleasure, Malcolm.”  Then she walks on with her own tray and sits down beside Hess, and within moments the two of them are talking and laughing – a fact that’s remarkable in itself, as the two of them heartily despise each other, but no trace of that is apparent here.  Evidently no malice is borne over the last piece of pineapple cake, which I eat quickly in case the dream goes away, because it tastes absolutely delicious.  So delicious, in fact, that I’m not sure even Alice could make a better one._

_Surreptitiously I watch the people around me.  They are not all laughing; some look serious – de la Haye sets out my abandoned chess pieces again and takes on the ever-hopeful Mayweather, and McKenna sits to one side, absorbed in the contents of a PADD.  But nevertheless, there is a subtle difference to their faces that it takes me a while of silent study to identify._

_They are not afraid._

_When the pineapple cake is all eaten, even the crumbs (waste is discouraged in the Empire, with the financial drain of the constant war effort, but even if it wasn’t I’d still have eaten the lot), I wonder what to do next.  I could go to look at the Armoury, but I might meet myself there, and then I don’t know what either of us would do about it.  More importantly still, I might meet someone else there, the memory of whom gives me a sudden strong shudder._

_In seconds I feel calm again, though I take advantage of the moment to remind myself not on any account to go down to G Deck.  That would be a Very Bad Thing, though I’m not sure why, and I will not do it._

_I can go to my quarters instead. There’s always a chance of my being there as well, but if the Alpha Shift are eating and relaxing then something tells me I’m more likely to be in the gymnasium._

_I have a very bad moment when I leave the Mess Hall.  I almost collide with Captain Archer, who is apparently not dead.  This is extremely surprising, since we recently came to the conclusion it was no longer either expedient or necessary to keep him alive, but here indeed he is, walking his ever-present dog.  The dog is almost as much of a surprise as Archer himself, because instead of the leashed Rottweiler which normally glowers at every passer-by as though planning where to sink its teeth into them, it’s a small and cheerful beagle who runs up to me wagging his tail as if he’s absolutely delighted to see me.  Almost before I realise what I’m doing, I bend and pat his head awkwardly before straightening up to face the captain._

_This is even more unnerving than all the rest of them put together.  The man actually smiles at me, and though I recognise the ever-present weight of responsibility in his face, the grooves of bad temper and suspicion are simply not there.  In fact, he appears so terminally genial that in the general way of things I’d suspect him of being mentally deficient in some way, but there’s a quick intelligence in the hazel eyes that gives the lie to that idea._

_“Don’t forget it’s Movie Night tonight, Malcolm,” he says, smiling.  “After the way you saw off that Kreetassan pirate vessel today, I told Trip to make sure he finds something with lots of explosions for you.”_

_“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, sir,” I respond awkwardly, since he evidently expects me to say something in reply._

_“I’ll see you there.” And off he wanders, with the beagle happily trotting on ahead, while I stare after the two of them in perplexity._

_We had Movie Night on our own_ Enterprise _, of course – the real one.  It was an excellent opportunity for showing propaganda films, and attendance was mandatory, especially for the aliens on board.  Normally if Tucker was ordered to produce something with ‘lots of explosions’ I’d expect to watch a particularly successful strike on a rebel base, complete with a spectacular casualty list, but something tells me that this is not what is likely to feature tonight._

_The theme is repeated over and over again as I make my way slowly to my quarters.  Everyone I meet either smiles at me or gives a nod of what seems to be genuine respect._

_It’s mystifying.  How can people respect me if they’re not afraid of me?_

_And yet–_

_I turn a corner, and there she is.  Such a wave of fear passes through me that I actually feel the tickle of something in my right wrist, making me calm again._

_“I heard about the pirates,_ Patrón _,” she says, with a delighted smile that makes her look quite astonishingly lovely – though in an utterly different way to any I’ve ever seen, even when we were shagging to celebrate the final destruction of the resistance on Rigel II.  “_ Dios mío _, they will think again before they take on another Starfleet ship!”_

_I mutter something self-effacing.  I can’t in the least understand why everyone seems to think that allowing an enemy ship to get away from a hostile encounter without being blasted to smithereens is something I should be congratulated on; if I’d done the logical thing and pulverised the bloody pirates there and then there’d be no possibility at all of them thinking about taking on another Starfleet ship._

_Ever._

_‘Starfleet’ ... not ‘Imperial’.  Once again the suggestion drifts through my mind that this is all something I read about once, but it seems so_ real _, so_ possible _...._

_“The Kreetassan government has thanked us for our intervention,” a cool voice says from behind us.  If I weren’t so relaxed I’d probably spin on the spot, but instead I just turn and look at T’Pol.  Far from being half-naked and feral, she’s dignified and calm, in a light blue catsuit that pays tasteful tribute to her lovely figure rather than parading it; her hair is cut short, right up to the nape of her neck, and is as immaculately neat as all the rest of her.  “They are despatching a patrol to the area, and thanks to the information you gathered, they are confident that the pirates may be tracked down and brought to justice.  Well done, Lieutenant.”_

_She doesn’t linger, but walks on, giving me a chance to snatch an unprofessional and admiring glance at her arse, which the catsuit displays to perfection.  Em, of course, catches me at it and gives me a conspiratorial grin.  Her hair is braided up, which usually means she’s going out on the prowl and doesn’t want to risk a stray strand of it spoiling her aim, but here it gives her an air of brisk professionalism that in no way detracts from the fact that she has a perfectly beautiful face.  I’m not at all surprised that Maj–_

_The tickle is stronger this time.  G Deck.  Must not go onto G Deck._

_She doesn’t linger either.  She covers the Gamma Shift, so it’s probably about her time for bed.  My mind swerves away from the thought that she may visit G Deck, and a third tickle makes me so relaxed I feel for a moment as though I’m sleepwalking._

_My quarters._

_I feel a brief twist of anxiety in case I may be there already, but my brief soft knock on the door receives no reply, and even I wouldn’t be so rude as to not answer myself at the door.  My code doesn’t work, but the security override does, and so I enter and stand looking at my own room as though I’ve never seen it before._

_It’s not that much different.  I can’t stand clutter, and the bed is neatly made, the chair tucked in at the desk.  There’s a notice board on the wall, though there’s not much on it, and the only other item of decoration is a lithograph of an old wooden-hulled sailing ship.  The small plaque set into the frame just says ‘HMS Victory’, which is puzzling; I’d have thought it should have been ISS, even then...._

_One thing that draws my attention, though, is the row of books on a shelf.  Real books, very old some of them; the sort of thing the Empire did away with years ago, as being far too useful a tool for secret sedition.  I look through them curiously, finding them well-read but well cared for.  The typefaces seem strange to the eye, not being the standard PADD type, but the feeling of an actual book in my hand feels oddly pleasant._

_The sound of the chime startles me so much I almost drop ‘British Naval Battles’, but I save it at the last second and replace it carefully on the shelf.  “Come in,” I say cautiously._

_The last time I saw this man it looked as though half of his face had been melted by radiation and the other half carved out of granite.  Now I see it relaxed and handsome, and he walks into my cabin, swings out the desk chair and sits down in it as though utterly sure of his welcome.  He has visited often, so often that he doesn't even think of it as he drops a couple of bottles onto the table.  “For later,” he says cheerfully.  “We’ll drink to those damned pirates you chased away.”_

_“Drinking to_ pirates? _” I echo incredulously._

_“Yeah.  Flyin’ straight into the long arm of the law, thanks to Mister Ultra-Cool Tactical Officer Reed.” He chortles up at me and pretends to shoot an imaginary pirate with his thumb and two fingers as a phase pistol._

_Tucker and I are_ friends! _This is such a mind-numbing realisation that I can hardly grasp it.  Rather than grudging the praise I have apparently earned, he is as delighted by my ‘success’ as if it was his own._

_The awkward thing now is that I have really no idea how to behave.  Never having had a friend in my entire adult life, I simply haven’t a clue how I’m supposed to respond to this kind of situation.  Luckily, he seems to notice nothing unusual in my tongue-tied state, but reminds me that Movie Night starts in an hour and I’m not to be late because he’s picked something off the database specially for me.  “At least we’ll have room to spread out now,” he adds gaily.  “Remember when we had all those damn MACOs aboard an' you couldn’t hardly swing a cat without hittin’ one of ‘em?”  He winks broadly.  “Not that you’ll be wishin’ ‘em back again – specially your pal Hayes.”_

_“Not in the least.”  My throat has tightened up so badly that it’s as much as I can do to force the words out.  For all that I clutch at the information that he is no longer aboard, still the name brings with it a wash of suffocating fear.  There’s something – something terrible–_

_I feel the familiar tickle at my wrist and the fear seeps away.  Something that might be my elbow brushes against the floor of the tank, and I roll lazily.  I am no longer heavy, no longer uncomfortable.  On the contrary, I am sleepy and content._

_I will go back to the dreaming._

_It was pleasant there._


	18. 17: Hero Worship (Lieutenant Richard Kelby)

The Chief said I did a good job on the tank. He was especially impressed with the way I tweaked the filtration system to reduce the pull of the current.

  'The Chief.' I can't believe how easily it has come to me to call him that. Just a few weeks ago, I hated him. Did my best to undermine him. I really didn't realize what a risk I was taking until he called it sedition. I guess, when you think about it, he kind of saved my life, bringing me here for training. If he hadn't convinced the Empress to give me a second chance, there's no telling what she'd have done to me.

  Or maybe there is. I've seen enough vids of traitors being executed to guess what might have been in my future … might still be, if they happen to rebroadcast that interview when the Empress isn't in a mood to be talked down. I'm guessing General Reed had a hand in designing some of those punishments. I didn't see it, but I've heard he even brought back Ling chi, the old Chinese execution torture of Death by a Thousand Cuts. Supposedly, he figured out how to keep the victim alive and conscious through more than 1,200 slices.

_Well, that was smart, Rich. Not going to be sleeping tonight now, are you?_

  I have to learn to stop dwelling on what might happen and focus on the things I can control. That's one of the things the Chief keeps telling me. With hard work and a little luck, if the Empress ever does see that vid again, maybe she can be convinced that I’m more valuable to her alive and serving as chief engineer on one of her starships than dead as an example to others with complaints against the Empire.

  I wish I could have seen them put the tank into service, but I lost my access to that part of the station the day I signed off that the job was finished. I'd love to know what they're keeping in it. I've seen Phlox around the station a few times, so I'm betting it's for one of his experimental animals. Unless it's something that can be weaponized to make the war end sooner, I don't see why that would be such a secret. I know the Chief says there are some questions you just don't want the answers to, but I worked hard on that job and I'm proud of how my team came together for me. I think we all deserve to know what our project is being used for.

  You could have knocked me over with a feather when the Chief told me he was proud of me. It made me feel good, but I couldn't help but notice that he actually seemed disappointed.

  Was he hoping I'd fail?

  And if he was, _why_?

  But I just don't get that vibe from him. He's a different guy to who he was on _Enterprise._ He's, well, kind of _nice_ most of the time.

  I've seen Liz Cutler around the station. She used to work in Sickbay. Maybe she knows what Phlox is up to. If the tank was for him, she might be able to tell me what he's doing with it.

  Once I finished the tank, the Chief put me to work for Commander Hess constructing a new ship. She gave me the choice of installing the bridge or the sickbay. I talked it over with the Chief, and he suggested that, with all of the systems that run through the bridge, I might want to work on my organizational skills before I take on such a big challenge. Sickbay doesn't have quite as many individual stations and panels to install, but it'll be good practice for a bigger job like the bridge, and it has a lot more power running through it for the imaging chamber and some of the diagnostic equipment. I'm pretty good at balancing and calibrating power flow, and I was surprised how happy it made me that the Chief knew that.

  He really does seem sincere about wanting to mentor me. I wonder what's changed. If it was just that interview I gave, it would have been easier for him to arrange an accident for me at Utopia Planitia.

  I know he's never thought much of my skills as an engineer, and I can't say that I blame him. I'm smart enough but not gifted like he is (not that anybody else is, either), and my whole class was deployed early – halfway through training – after a particularly nasty series of battles depleted personnel. Back on _Enterprise,_ when Tucker assigned me to tasks and equipment I'd never been trained on, I was afraid to admit I didn't know what I was doing. Drill instructors and training officers seemed to enjoy making sure recruits knew what happens to dead weight out on the line.

  So I muddled through the best I could, and lucky for me my best was good enough most of the time. I only got in over my head when something out of the ordinary happened, which occurs on a fairly regular basis when you're working on a battleship in the middle of a war zone.

  I wonder now if things would have been different then if I’d reminded him occasionally that I never got to finish my training as an engineer.

  Well, just about the time he accepted my apology for what I said in the interview, I decided that if he was going to try, I would too. I started by just paying attention to some of the things he does. When he's starting a meeting, he always begins with, 'Welcome,' or 'Good morning,' and he states his agenda. He smiles sometimes, too, and I'm beginning to realize it's usually genuine. Even when he's talking about problems that need to be addressed, he smiles, because he's confident in his people and pleased to have them working for him.

  He doesn't smile at me very often, yet, but when he does, it's as authentic as it is when he does it for Hess or Rostov or anybody else on the station. And maybe it means more to me since it's been such a long time coming.

  The Chief always greets people when he first sees them, too, whether it's in the corridor or at their posts. Even when he's walking and talking, busy taking care of business, everyone he sees gets at least a nod of recognition. He usually says 'good morning' or 'hello' and calls them by name, or with Hess and Rostov a more personal 'How you doin'?' And sometimes when the Chief is in a playful mood, he calls Rostov ‘Mikey’.

  It shocked me right down to my socks the first time he called me Richard, even though it did sound a lot like an insult at the time. I had no idea he actually knew my given name. I'm even more amazed that he knows the names of all the recruits who are here on their first six-weeks training assignment. I asked him about it, why he uses people's names and how he remembers them all.

  "Well, Richard, it's simple really. I want 'em to know that I see 'em as people, not just personnel, an' I don't want 'em to think for even one little minute that I expect 'em to forget who they are just 'cause they're workin' for me," he said. "As for knowin' the recruits' names, that's just plain hard work. I get their files about a week before they come to the station an' in my abundance of free time," (The sarcasm was hard to miss. Everybody knows the man who runs the station works twelve-hour shifts, usually six days a week, and is on-call round the clock), "I sit down at my computer in my quarters an' I study 'em. I practice matchin' their names with their faces an' at least one other thing about 'em, whether it be their hometown or an award they've received or a sport they played in school."

  Then he gave me this squinty-eyed look, like he was thinking, and after a moment he asked, "You were an all-state runnin' back, weren't you?"

  I smiled, feeling ridiculously flattered. "Yessir," I told him proudly. "Rockford Rams, class of '49. It was supposed to be my ticket to college, but I blew out my knee during the division championship game my senior year. Surgery fixed me up pretty good, but when the final round of scholarship offers went out, nobody was giving anything to a freshman on crutches with three months of physical therapy ahead of him before he even knew for sure if he'd be able to walk to class."

  "Could you have tried out for a walk-on position?" he asked me, and I swear there was real sympathy in his tone, like he knew what it felt like to be so close to a dream and have it dissolve at his touch.

  "I'd have had to pay full tuition," I told him with a shake of my head. "The money just wasn't there."

  He sighed and said, "I'm sorry to hear that, Richard, but you're in good company, you know. You're not the only one who's here because his other plans just didn't work out.

  "I was a wide receiver myself," he continued with a nostalgic tone. "Never amounted to much. I was more interested in the cheerleaders than the game, but none of them ever noticed me. I spent too much time gettin' splinters in my ass from ridin' the bench."

  I shared a laugh with him. The moment was surreal. He could have had me spaced for that interview I gave, and there we were, reminiscing about our high school football careers. I was starting to understand what he meant about seeing his people as _people_ instead of just personnel, but I also got the feeling he somehow included himself among those who were in the Fleet only because their other plans fell through. It kind of made me wonder what plans he had for himself if being one of the most powerful men in the Empire was a disappointment to him.

  In a way, it made me respect him a whole lot more.

  "You know, Chief, my friends call me Rich," I told him.

  He gave me this smile – a genuine grin, actually, that was enough to make you forget the radiation damage – and said, "That's good to know, Rich."

  I can't explain why, but it made me feel warm all over to hear him call me Rich.


	19. 18: Visitation (General Emilia Gomez)

Time.

Time... it passes so slowly and yet so quickly.  There is so much to do in the business of ruling an Empire such as ours, so much to think of ... and yet, in the back of my mind, there is a constant thought.

Of course, it is of the _bebé_. 

Nature may be guided, governed and even – as we have done – manipulated.  But one thing we cannot do is hurry her.

The video feed is always available.  In my spare moments, I look at it.  But if I am honest with myself, I do not look for too long, or too closely.

The scanners are easier to deal with.

The _bebé_ is growing fast.  A healthy boy.  My son, conceived to rule, soon to be born to rule.  The son whom I shall acquire with none of the indignities of pregnancy, nor the pain of childbirth.  They will place him in my arms and he will know I am his mother, and that is all that matters.

I passed Cutler in the corridor an hour ago.  She saluted me, as she should do, and said ‘Thank you, Ma’am’.  For what, she did not say, and did not need to.

Her tone was properly respectful.  Her salute was perfection.  Nevertheless, for one fraction of a second her eyes met mine. She should not do that, look me in the eye, for sometimes, _las razones_ _se_ _me escapan_ , part of me wants to look away. If that part ever prevails, I will have to kill her.

She tends to The Project daily.  I have watched her on the feeds.  When he is brought up, to have the surface of his body treated with water-resistant gel, she smooths it on with professional care.  She neither hurries nor lingers; there is not a second where I or anyone else could point to her action and say, _There, there it is_ and have no doubt of our own justice.  But nonetheless, _it_ is there.  I know it.

Others, if they are aware of _it_ at all, are probably amused or perplexed by the pathetic little _perra_ , so utterly _destruida_ by the man who used her so brutally that she is ruined for any other, still tending him faithfully even when he is too helpless to do as much as call her by a cruel name. But they have not looked into her eyes, they do not truly understand what _it_ is, how deep _it_ runs.

I know that _it_ is much more than the sick attachment of a shattered mind. I have looked into her eyes.

 _Its_ presence there irks me.

I could order her removed.  I could order her killed.  Who would care?

She has only lived this long because she had the courage to tell me when The Project was not receiving the best of care. The fact that Phlox has never come to complain of her interference tells me she was correct.

The Denobulan would be dead now if not for his irreplaceable knowledge and skills.

That fool assures me that the sedatives prevent _him_ from thinking.  But still, as he is brought to the surface I see him look to see who is there.  When she is among those waiting, he finds her face, and he does not look aside.

He does not smile.  Why should he smile?  We have left nothing in him that is capable of it.  But if he did, I would kill her.

I wonder if she realizes this. If she does, where does she find the courage in her shattered little heart to continue tending him?

I do not like this Elizabeth Cutler, and I do not understand her. Perhaps it is only my curiosity keeping her alive now.

I have reports to read.  My eyes run down them, but I do not see anything.  This is not _aceptable._

I rise almost without knowing it, and my feet take me to Sickbay.  The closer we come to it, the more slowly I walk. I feel a tiredness coming over me.

There are technicians there, though they know better than to glance in my direction. The Project is never allowed to be without its guardians in attendance.  Every heartbeat is monitored.

Fortunately there is no-one to monitor mine as I stand and look through the glass.  For no reason at all it has slowed, and the heart that produces it hangs like a stone inside my ribcage, its weight alone sapping my strength. 

 _“Em...”_ The memory is the softest of whispers in my mind.

He is directly opposite me.

His hair has grown, in the intervening months; it drifts around his head in a soft cloud.  His nails have also grown, of course, but they are clipped short – they would be too apt as weapons, against himself or anyone else.  The glass is the only hard surface he encounters.  His whole universe is soft, blunt, vague.

The monitors tell me he is dreaming, but I would have known it anyway.  The muscles in his body have lost condition, even though he now has space to move and sometimes idly pushes himself to and fro, presumably for amusement or just because the different sensations please him, but still I see the small movements.  The ghost of a tiny smile flickers across his mouth, despite what Phlox has said; he is smiling in his dreams, and at the sight the stone in my breast grows unaccountably heavier, pulling me toward the floor as if wanting to make me crawl, but I deliberately straighten my shoulders and stand upright.

With an effort, I put my hands against the glass. The surface is smooth and warm and unyielding.

I had not _meant_ to do this, I did not realize how it would be when I agreed to the plan. Alpha cannot _share_ power. The changes caused by the advanced MACO conditioning he endured have given him _una compusión_ to protect his place as _the_ Alpha. Anyone in his _círculo de infuencia_ must submit or be killed.

Alpha was sensing a threat to his position. I did not wish for _him_ to die any more than Alpha wished to kill him. It could not be helped.

_"At least this way, he will live."_

His eyes half-open, and I catch my breath.  Against all the drugs that are being pumped into him, is it possible he can be waking?  But they flutter shut again, and the lashes lie unmoving on the waxed pallor of his cheek.

It comes to me how often I have seen them lying there; how often he and I lay beside one another.  How despite everything we trusted one another, insofar as anyone can in the world we inhabit.

He was not ‘The Project’ then.

I had not meant to _do_ this, but the Alpha male _must_ breed. At the time, I imagined a happy event. We were making _una familia_. The three of us, and our child. I had not considered what it would take to make _him_ submit.

_"At least this way, he will live."_

Whether he wants to, or not.

Ensign Cutler does not refer to him as ‘The Project’ in her mind.  I know this, as only a woman can know what another woman is thinking. She uses another word.  There were times, in secret, when I breathed or gasped that word against his skin.

That, or another, which was only for him....

_‘...Queri–’_

_“Command Center to General Gomez.”_ The call sounding through the comm. system breaks into my mind.  It is Alpha, of course.  I sigh, feeling his hands caress me. As sometimes happens, the sensation fails to waken the desire within me. I am simply too tired to respond.

My hands slip from the glass, too heavy for me to hold them up any longer.

The Project is proceeding as it should.

I had _not_ meant to do this, but there is no going back now. _Es cierto_ we would both die trying _._

It is not simply ego. Alpha _cannot_ tolerate an equal and he _cannot_ deny his _imperativo biológico_ to breed. It is part of his DNA now _._

_"At least this way, he will live."_

And if he does not wish to live like this? _Desafortunadamente, no hay remedio._

 _"Em....”_ The whisper fades softly, like the last notes of a melody in a dream.  On my way to the door I pause for half a step, frowning, as I try to grasp it, but it has gone, leaving behind nothing but a vague sadness.  This is the way of dreams, after all.

Still, in the doorway I pause once more and look back.  But suddenly the lights are harsh and painful to my eyes, and the tatters of my memories swirl around me and fly away, scattering like cherry blossoms in the wind as I awaken into hard and certain reality. The Project has half turned over.  Its body is almost dominated now by the bulge, the bulge where my son is growing strong.

And only the strong survive.

As for me, I think I should go back to my quarters and rest.


	20. 19: Book Club (Commodore Charles Tucker)

 

  T'Pol and I have started…talking.

  I don't recall just when, and I don't know exactly _why,_ but I'm pretty damned sure _I_ didn't start it. She might not have used words at first, but for people who supposedly bury their emotions, some Vulcans can sure say a hell of a lot with those big brown eyes.

  I hadn't noticed until recently that they're _always_ on me, except when Liz Cutler is in the room. True, no one else bothers me in my quarters, but that's because I make it a point to see _all_ of my people two or three times a week, or at least be sure they see me. There's too many of them for me to speak to each one personally every time, but they know it's never more than seventy-two hours before they can flag me down and talk to me about whatever's on their mind, or (if it's personal or time consuming) they can request an appointment. I always carry a PADD on me, and one of its functions is sending messages to my PA, Eloise, whose duties include scheduling my appointments and keeping me on schedule. Liz has to find me in my quarters or the mess hall because she's medical personnel, and I don't go to the medical facility anymore unless I'm called for a specific reason. Fucking Phlox. Every time I see him now, I feel like I'm going to be sick.

  Even if I'm the only person in the room, though, my pet Vulcan doesn't _have_ to watch my every move. She could look somewhere else now and then. I have a few pictures on the walls she could look at and some knick-knacks and trinkets on my shelves (though I suppose she has all day to look at those, and I daresay she’s gotten bored of them by now). Or she could watch one of the movies or read one of the books I have downloaded to a PADD for her. _Old Yeller_ is a classic. I still tear up every time they have to put him down, whether it's the movie or in print, and she has both. Hell, she _could_ just close her eyes and sleep, or she could fold herself into a damned pretzel and meditate.

  I won't allow her a candle. An open flame in a place like this is too much risk. Sometimes, when I'm actually out of the office _working_ with my engineers, I'll get different lubricants, coolants, sealants, or other chemicals on my coveralls. Some of them are volatile compounds that can produce explosive gases. It might be pretty unlikely, but there's a chance that if, say, I wanted to have some fun with my toy in bed and just left my clothes in a heap on the floor, striking a spark to light a real candle a couple hours later could ignite my quarters like a blowtorch.

  So, I made her a pretty realistic imitation candle. It has a tiny, flickering LED bulb for a light and an internal warming element to diffuse the essential oils that are used to give Vulcan meditation candles their scent. She was surprised when I gave it to her.

  "I'm not stupid," I pointed out. "When I was a kid an' havin' nightmares from some scary movie I'd watched, Mama'd put lavender an' chamomile oils on a cotton ball an' slip it inside my pillow. I'd fall right back to sleep an' sleep soundly the rest of the night. She called it aromatherapy. I figured your meditation candles would be the same kind of thing: not essential, but useful."

  "How did you know what oils to use, or the traditional colors for the candles?" she asked.

  Shrugging, I told her the truth. "I asked one of the Vulcan conscripts in the salvage yard."

  "I see. So you consulted one slave on the appropriate specifications of a gift for another slave," she said coldly. "That is interesting. I wonder if your ancestors dealt with their dark-skinned human chattels in the same manner."

  I felt anger flare up in me at that moment. I actually had my fist closed to backhand her across the room, and it was on the tip of my tongue to tell her the Tuckers were never slave-holders. In fact, my ancestors were abolitionists, and one of them was supposedly hanged for his involvement in the Underground Railroad.

  The irony of that hit me like a punch in the gut. I'd known that story all my life. It was part of my heritage, one of the things that made me proud to be a Tucker. How is it that I never saw before the truth of what I'd been doing?

  Still, I wasn't ready yet to think about if or how I wanted to change things between her and me (with all the extra complications _that_ could involve!), so I just growled at her, "Do ya want it, or don't ya?"

  I’m pretty sure she knew she’d pushed her luck about as far as it would go without breaking in her hands, but she held her ground.  "I'm grateful for it," she said evenly, inclining her head slightly. "Thank you."

  Since then, things have changed between us, just a little. Gotten a bit more comfortable – for both of us, I guess.  A couple of nights a week, now, I come back to my quarters, and after a shower and a drink, we turn up some music and sit back on my bed and talk.

 She didn’t make it to where she was on _Enterprise_ by being dumb.  Obviously it wouldn’t have been a survival technique to let on just how bright she was, but now, very slowly and cautiously, she starts to open up.  It feels a bit like two climbers on a precipice – each of us reaches for a foothold and tests it, both knowing that the higher we go the more we’re depending on each other.

  She thinks I’m doing the right thing by Kelby. She reminds me that he was part of a training class a few years back that was deployed to the line months ahead of schedule because we needed warm bodies on active ships. I'm a little pissed off at him for never reminding me of that fact, even when we got back to Sol, where incompetents are retrained instead of being spaced; but I'm more pissed off at myself, and even _more_ ashamed, for not knowing. It would be no lie to say that we were so damned busy I just forgot that I'd read that in his file, but for an engineer who prides himself on solving problems, it's inexcusable that I just wrote him off as stupid and lazy and never bothered to find out _why_.

  One night, I ask her why she seems to like gameshows so much, and why in particular she bothers to inform me when they get one of their own questions wrong.

  "You do know they're all rigged?" I ask, and for some reason the answer I get makes a chill slither like a snake down my spine.

  "If by rigged, you mean planned or scripted to favor a preferred winner, yes, blatantly so," she agrees. "And while I find it inexplicable that people either don't notice or accept the heavily influenced results as if they were fair, simply because the shows provide them entertainment, what I find truly fascinating is the way these shows disseminate and propagate a revisionist history that skews all events to cast the Empire in the best possible light. It appears to be quite intentional. There seems to be a certain popular subgroup of shows that all draw from the same pool of questions, and at times, the same question and false answer will be used on most or all of the shows within a given week.

  "Early in the week, contestants give the true correct answer and the host corrects them with the false one. Toward the middle of the week, contestants guess something that is neither the true nor the approved false answer, but something that has elements of both. By the end of the week, the contestants are responding with the false answer as if they have always known it to be true, and are awarded points for it. It is as if, by repeating and rewarding a lie often enough, the Empire hopes to make it true in people's minds."

  Her theory sounds uncomfortably familiar. It takes me a minute or two to recall where I've come across it before, and another minute or two to decide what I'm going to do about it.

  T'Pol waits quietly.

  One of the first things Hoshi did when she took power was to lock down the _Defiant's_ database. She was smarter than Archer in that she recognized the danger knowledge of a different universe presented. If people were unhappy in the Terran Empire, and particularly if their fate in that other universe was more to their liking, they could be tempted to try to remake our Empire in the Federation's image. Now, that could be good for the aliens and most of the human civilians if the change could be handled in an orderly fashion and if they somehow managed to keep the power void from just being filled by more corrupt people than we already have. However, it would be very _bad_ for a lot of people at the top of the government and military food chains, myself included, and worst of all for the Empress.

  I only have access to the full database because I convinced her it was necessary to completing the specs for the ship efficiently. When I needed information on something I had to be able to search and retrieve it, wherever it was stored. After a few months, she was satisfied that I wasn't going to do anything crazy with all that data, so, when she gave me Jupiter Station, she decided not to revoke my password.

  The _Defiant_ 's database has an extensive fiction library. I've been poking around in it for years now, discovering some things that I never could have imagined. Things that are really starting to change the way I think about the world. I even found a genre of literature that we never heard about in school: dystopian fiction.

  And now, I think I might just be about to do something crazy.

  I’ve already compared this … thing … that’s going on between me and T'Pol to a couple of climbers.  Even up till now I’ve been taking risks – small risks at first, true, but getting bigger.  Now I’m about to put my entire weight on the rope I’ve given her and count on her to hang on by her fingernails at the same time I give her the knife she could use to cut me loose.  Yet somehow, perhaps foolishly, I trust her not to send me tumbling into the crevasse below.

  I can't seem to stop myself. I feel as if the past few months have been pushing me forward to this moment; slowly, to be sure, but with all the force of a warp engine. With a sick feeling of fear and inevitability, I take T'Pol's PADD and upload a book called _1984_.

  I know the risk I am taking, the danger in this seemingly innocent act.

  This is called _sedition_.

  "Read that," I tell her, "an' tell me what you think of it tomorrow."

  For an average human, reading a whole book in a day – especially one written in a foreign language – would be a big ask.  However, I already know that her fluency in English isn’t confined to just speech, and that she can read extremely fast, and it's a short book, anyway, and she'll have all day.

  I should probably remind her that it’d be a real good survival technique not to mention to anyone that she’s even heard of it, let alone read it; in some ways that thing might as well be a handbook for whoever set up the Empire in the first place.  But then she’s more than bright enough to work out in the first couple of paragraphs what kind of material she’s reading, and considering her strong sense of self-preservation I guess she’s not about to advertise something that’d get both of us put against a wall and shot – me for giving it to her and her for just knowing it exists.

    The next night we discuss the book, and she agrees there are eerie similarities to the Empire. That's all I wanted to hear. It’s enough to convince me that certain things I’ve heard and seen are more than just fairy tales and certain things I’ve imagined could be possible.

  No one can ever know about our little seditionist book club, so I delete the novel from her PADD and overwrite it several times. Having that story on it is like having a live grenade sitting in my quarters. The pin will probably never come loose, just like no one will likely ever bother reading what's on the one PADD I allow my Vulcan sex-slave to use, but why risk the fatal disaster that would occur if the practically impossible were, through some freak accident, ever to happen?

 That was one of Dada’s favorite sayings and I’ve never forgotten it: ‘Never think it _won’t_ happen – make sure it _can’t_ happen.’

  A couple of days later, I tell her about Reed. Not everything, of course; there are some things I still can't find the words to say.

  She doesn’t interrupt, but listens intently.  I suppose it’s not surprising that she doesn’t shudder at his fate; a woman as attractive as she is would have required intensive ‘interrogation’ when she came on board.  Given how well known it is that Vulcans are so much stronger than humans, I’m guessing he had her shackled like a young bull about to be turned into a steer when he fucked her.

  Her solution is eminently logical, perfectly simple.

  "You have to kill them all," she says calmly. "For General Reed, it will be a release. Alpha and Gomez are trying to subvert humanity; the evidence suggests that he at least is no longer fully human. Phlox is too mercenary, too willing to sell his skills to the highest bidder. They are too powerful and too dangerous, and they must be stopped. Find someone who will align himself with you and the Empress and who has the power to command at least the bulk of the MACOs, and then kill them all."

  I'm not proud to say it, but those are my thoughts exactly.

 


	21. 20: Extraction (General Malcolm Reed)

  I have no idea how much time has passed when one day I wake to find many more people than usual staring in at me through the glass.

  I’ve been a goldfish for so long that I hardly notice the people who come and go every day, looking in at me.  They seem happy enough just to look, and I’m happy enough to ignore them.  Now and again they bring me gently right to the top, where the glass is unaccountably missing, and rub some kind of nice-smelling stuff into my skin; I don’t know why they do this, but it feels good. More often than not, it is the Nice One who does this, and she makes sure I don’t feel afraid, so that’s just part of my routine.  I spend most of the time dozing or dreaming, and the dreams are so pleasant that I never want to leave them.  I know so much about life in that other _Enterprise_ now, about the life that not-me lives there.  Of course it’s not real, it never could be real, but in my few periods of dim reflection, how much I wish it was.  How I wish that there was such comradeship, such trust, such friendship.  How I wish that I could work and talk and even laugh with people I respect.

  How I wish it was real.

  But my existence is so vague now that I only remember intermittently that it isn’t, and those periods don’t seem to consist of anything much – just propelling myself idly around the tank, and feeling the slight bump as I bounce off the sides.  I seem to have plenty of room, and if the tubes start to get wrapped around me and bothersome someone will always lean in and untangle me.  The tank’s not very deep, so they can reach me without actually having to get in, but it’s long enough for me to kick off one end and drift a few seconds before I reach the other, and I can turn around again easily enough, though lately I’ve found it oddly and increasingly awkward, as though my body’s become somewhat ungainly for some reason.  Definitely I have periods of strange discomfort, almost as though my internal organs have acquired a mysterious life of their own, and on the odd occasion when I glance downwards I do seem to be somewhat on the large size, though without exception a wash of drowsiness prevents me from taking too much notice.  So life’s pretty comfortable, on the whole.  Not that I have any inclination to complain ... that would take far too much effort.

  Today, however, the slow routine is broken.  The sight of all those faces stirs a vague disquiet, though none of them is familiar enough to bring the muffled sound of the alarm-wail from my box.  Twos and threes are normal, but there must be many more than two or three, and they are all looking at me very hard, with something more than the usual almost passing interest.

  The caretaker I think of as the Nice One is here, watching me with the others. Her expression is as placid as always, but her eyes are troubled. I know she would never hurt me, or let anyone else hurt me, but seeing her worried and trying to hide it worries me, at least until the expected calm washes over me. Then all thoughts of some terrible thing she is helpless to prevent flow away and I am content to float in my pink pool again.

  The strange doctor is among my visitors, too.  Although I know he must be a very nice person, something about his expression makes me shiver, and it’s with a slightly stronger movement than usual that I push off the glass wall opposite him and turn away.

  But the pink pressure all around me seems different, and after a moment it dawns on me that it’s growing less.  The not-water is slowly and silently draining out of the tank, and for the first time I discover that even when I’m right at the bottom of it, there’s not enough left to cover me.  And it goes on sinking, uncovering me to a world that now seems cold and frighteningly intangible.

  After so long of being practically weightless, the return of gravity would naturally be exhausting.  My languid progresses around the tank have afforded my muscles some activity, with the resistance of the pinkness helping to increase the effort required, but I’d have had to swim around an Olympic swimming pool like a barracuda every day to have kept up the muscle tone that would cope with this sudden re-emergence into the grip of normal gravity.

  And if the weight weren’t enough, I soon find that I’m running out of pink to breathe in.  Although for some reason it’s horribly uncomfortable putting any pressure on my abdomen, I grind my face into the last few centimetres as best I can, and thrash desperately as I feel hands gripping me.

  Not for long, of course; the familiar wash of tranquillity stills me once again.  But all the same, I can’t stop myself gasping frantically as I’m lifted and alien air clasps my face, invading my mouth and nose as the pink runs out of me.

  At this point most of the world goes away. There are mercifully vague impressions of being carried and lowered again, and of things being done to my face and throat while many hands hold me still.  The Nice One strokes my cheeks with her thumbs as she cradles my face in her hands, holding me and soothing me while the others do I know not what.  Although I’m still helpless to move and certainly can’t speak, her gaze is a lifeline to which I cling, the only thing now that offers me even a tiny measure of security.  But when the world begins to eddy back to me again there is the strange, dry feeling of air hushing in and out of my lungs, and blearily I remember that there was a time when this was quite normal.

_Normal_ , however, is not a word that even my brain of congealed cotton wool can apply to the absolutely crushing weight of my body.  Wisps of memory tell of whales dying on beaches, suffocated by the pressure of their own mass, and I am a whale, stranded and helpless, stupefied by my own inability to do more than rock the appalling prison in which I suddenly find myself.  My own bones are the bars, and I am trapped inside them.  The concept is so horrible that I struggle to get my brain around it; surely my thoughts were not always this slow, this difficult?

  I miss the pink.  I miss its pressure, its warmth.  Even though I am breathing air again, and it is growing easier, the lack of it around me is like the chill of space, and the people who shoulder the Nice One out of the way to surround me are no comfort.  Very quickly they fasten straps to my wrists and ankles again (I had forgotten those), and although the surface on which they lay me is soft enough, I remember the sensation of being unable to move.  As the strap settles on my forehead again, it is like waking from a dream into a nightmare.

  Their voices are loud.  After so long of hearing them only distantly, they batter on my eardrums.

  “The medication will have to be reduced gradually,” the doctor says.  “We don’t know if a sudden withdrawal would be too stressful.”

  “There haven’t been any contraindications with regard to development?” somebody asks.

  “None whatsoever.” His voice is fat with confidence.  “In human terms, we’re approaching the midpoint of the third trimester.  I’m ready to administer all the additional hormones.  There should be no problem at all.”

  “And what about the....” the Nice One starts to ask, but she is instantly glared into silence by all the faces that whip in her direction.

  “ _Everything_ has been taken into consideration,” the doctor says bitingly.  “There will be no danger whatsoever.  I have orders to intervene _immediately_ if there is the slightest sign of a problem.”

  The Nice One retires, crushed.  Everyone nods, satisfied.

  And they all smile down at me.


	22. 21: Promotion (Lieutenant JG Elizabeth Cutler)

  As usual, I arrive for my 08:00 shift at 07:40. I like to be early so I have time to review the charts, talk to the nurse who's going off duty, and have a cup of coffee in the small canteen at the back of Sickbay. Jupiter Station is a big place, and with the protocols in place in the secure sections, it isn't possible to make it to the main mess and back on our meal breaks. Most of the research suites are kitted out with at least a drinks dispenser, a small fridge, and a microwave. Galley minions with the appropriate clearances stock us up with snacks, salads, sandwiches, and meals we can reheat once a day.

  It's a typical day, just like every day for the past eight months has been. Then I scan my badge and the door to the Project Suite buzzes instead of beeps. Maybe I scanned it too quickly? I try again. It buzzes again, and now I see the red diodes on the display panel flashing: _ACCESS DENIED._ Amber diodes below that scroll another message: _Please contact Project Director for status update._

  Status update? Did something happen in the night? Is it Time? Why would that cause me to be locked out of the Project Suite?

  I press the call button – there is one on the main entrance to every research suite for those rare times when unauthorized specialists are required for a specific task – and I wait. I don’t know if it's been ten seconds or a lifetime, but when no one comes, I buzz again. This time, with a great effort of will, I count off ten seconds. When there is still no response, I press the button again. And again. And again.

  " _Please wait patiently, Ms. Cutler!_ " Phlox's voice burbles out of the speaker. " _I am on my way. Do not buzz me again, hmm?_ "

  Phlox is coming for me. This can't be good. I desperately want to know what has happened to Malcolm, but asking would be too dangerous.

  "Ahh, Ms. Cutler! Good morning!"

  He steps out of the Project Suite, closing the door behind him, and gives me one of those grins that stretches his face to freakishly cheerful proportions. A cold undertone of malice sends chills chasing down my spine so that it takes a conscious effort not to shiver. Phlox is at his most dangerous when he is happy like this. Only now does it occur to me that Malcolm might _not_ be the one in trouble.

  "You're early, hmm?" he observes, consulting his chronometer. "Your shift doesn't start for another seventeen minutes."

  "I'm always early," I tell him, schooling my tone and expression to appear placid and calm. "I like to be updated on what's happened overnight before I start work."

  "Ahh, yes, such devotion to duty is rare," he says, and the note of sarcasm I hear in his bubbly praise makes my flesh crawl. "I couldn't allow it to go unrewarded, so I've had a word with General Gomez."

  "It's my job, Doctor," I reply with as little inflection as possible. "That really wasn't necessary."

  "Nonsense! It was the _least_ I could do," he says, sounding far too pleased with himself for my liking. "Follow me."

  He's unctuous and oily and I know that he knows I'm not fooled by his overly pleasant tones. He's done something horrible to me, I'm sure of it. I fall in step behind him and brace myself for whatever it is. The only thing I can do now is rob him of the satisfaction of seeing my devastation when he reveals his plot.

  We go down a corridor that wraps its way around the Project Suite to a door with a card reader, a key pad, and a retinal scanner. Pretending he's some kind of gentleman, he opens the door for me and gestures me in ahead of him.

  It's a tiny office, the walls lined with video monitors, and three computer screens on the desk. There is a small fridge with a microwave and a coffee pot in one corner. I'm almost surprised there's not a toilet stall in one of the others. Clearly, the person who works here is not expected to leave for any significant length of time during their shift.

  The room is already crowded with just the monitors and its sparse furniture. The three people waiting to greet me and Phlox crowding in behind me make it positively claustrophobic, but if I learned nothing else from the time I was with Malcolm, it was how to control panic.

  I come to stiff attention and salute. Generals Gomez and Alpha (if I had to guess, I would say he would be addressed most properly as General Hayes, but I pray to God I don't have to know because I don't trust my memory) return the gesture, along with a terrified MACO Corporal in the corner where I imagine the toilet could have been installed. We all wait for Alpha, the senior officer in the room, to drop the salute, but then it is General Gomez who gives me the _at ease_ command.

  I adjust my stance accordingly and shift my gaze to her as she continues talking,

  " _El Doctor_ has high praise for your work, Ensign Cutler," Gomez says. " _Especialmente_ , he notes your _atención_ _a detalles_ , your _dedicación_ to patient care beyond the _requirimientos_ of your job, and careful keeping of records."

  Contrary to custom with all other ranks in the Imperial Forces, it seems that she, the junior officer, officially General of the Military Assault Command, usually does the speaking when she and Alpha, General of the Unified Imperial Forces (which includes everything from the MACOs and the Imperial Fleet to the Palace Guards to most insignificant local constabulary on Earth or any of the Conquered Worlds) are together. It is almost as if she is his mouthpiece and he is too far above us to allow himself to be soiled by any communication with the rank and file. Instead, he just stands there watching, studying me, head cocked to one side like a curious dog. His lips curved into a bland smirk, clearly contrived to appear benign and therefore all the more terrifying. His glittering, pupilless blue eyes stare at me unblinkingly. I can't remember the last time I heard him speak, even in a public address. He just stands there, looking cool and aloof, while General Gomez or usually the Empress does the talking.

  At least when Malcolm attended public briefings…

  Suddenly, I have a headache.

  Almost as if he has read my mind, Alpha speaks up now.

  "Such devotion to duty cannot go unrewarded."  His voice is unusual, almost harmonious, as if there is more than one tone in each syllable. It makes my ears buzz and my teeth itch and I feel the slightest bit queasy. "We have decided to promote you."

  General Gomez steps forward then, opens a little velvet box I didn't see in her hand until now, and pins the new rank pip on me. The little button with the blank center next to my solid ensign's pip marks me as a Lieutenant, Junior Grade.

  Gomez steps back, we all salute again.

  " _¡Enhorabuena!_ " General Gomez says.

  Since now would be the time for my superior to offer congratulations, I say, "Thank you, ma'am," nod to Alpha to include him and say, "Sir," and hope my response is appropriate.

  Apparently it is, because the smirk that Gomez gives me now is infinitely more smug, self-satisfied, and … human … than any expression I have seen Alpha wear.

  " _El Doctor_ will brief you on the duties of your new position," she continues, "and Corporal Kelley will train you to use the equipment. This is your new _oficina_."

  There is barely enough room in my _'oficina'_ for me to stand aside to allow the generals to exit, but when I do, I can see Gomez's smirk echoed in ugly Denobulan caricature on Phlox's fat face as he gives me a gloating stare, and I finally realize the full extent of what has happened. 

  "I am sure you will be pleased to know, Lieutenant, that there will be no more tedious skin conditioning, no more smelly changing of those filthy diapers for you, hmm?" he says with a grin. "From here, you will be able to monitor the Project, all day long. If you see anything amiss, you will report it to me and the Generals immediately."

  I imagine myself punching him in the nose so hard my fist passes through his ugly, grinning face and bursts out the back of his shattered head as if it was a rotted Jack-o'-lantern a week after Halloween.

  He has taken me away from Malcolm.

  Alpha pauses in the doorway and gives me another of his bland, creepy, quizzical looks. Then one corner of his mouth curls up in a smile that gives me a chill so strong I can't suppress the shiver that comes with it. For the briefest fraction of a second, my mind flashes on an image of him, perfectly clear and seared into my memory so deeply that I know in that moment that I will be able to recall it with complete clarity and study it carefully any time I want for the rest of my life.

  He is a predator feasting on a meal of … raw flesh, I realize. His face and – he still has hands, but he holds them strangely – are covered in blood. He eats with great relish and utter abandon. When he sees me watching, he grins, showing me sharp, pointed teeth stained red and blood dribbling from the corners of his mouth. He is all animal and yet more truly human than I have ever seen him, and I know in my heart of hearts what he is feeling: lust and joy. He throws back his head, arches his back and howls.

  There is a twinge of blinding pain at my temple, and Alpha is gone before I am obliged to speak. I am shaking right down to my boots, helpless to hide my reaction, knowing that somehow, for some reason, he has _chosen_ to show us this; but watching Phlox's smug grin bleed off his face is almost worth the fright.

  Slimy Denobulan bastard!


	23. 22: Revenge (Doctor Phlox)

Revenge is really very sweet.

Our newly-minted lieutenant _had_ to realize that her little chat with General Gomez about the care our project was receiving would have serious repercussions for me. The very day she got authorization to remove the catheter, I was served with a formal request from the General for an accounting of the resources I have used for this project. Fortunately, I am a meticulous record-keeper. I routinely make false entries for the supplies I appropriate for personal and recreational use, just as I record those that are used for their intended purposes; so the General found nothing amiss.

Still, I am being watched closer than ever, now. As an alien – a high-ranking and relatively powerful alien, at that – in the Terran Empire, I have always been subject to greater scrutiny and deeper distrust than my human counterparts. This intensified observation, which has robbed my life of a considerable amount of pleasure for the past several months, is beginning to feel like a noose.

So, Ms Cutler should not have been surprised when I chose to retaliate. She should have realized from the moment she requested her little audience with General Gomez that I would be waiting, biding my time until I saw the perfect opportunity to strike.

It was worth the minor irritation of seeing a promotion awarded to a woman I cordially dislike, when she finally realized the cost of it.

General Gomez is extremely quick on the uptake.  I’m pleased to say that it hardly needed more than the suggestion that Cutler’s tireless devotion was really wasted on such mundane tasks as changing diapers and applying protective skin gel to the patient when such a responsible job as watching the monitors in a separate room was available.  I do believe that she’s really no fonder of Ensign – pardon me, _Lieutenant_ – Cutler than I am!

I don’t think that Alpha was more than amused by the whole affair.  Of course, he must know that Cutler used to be Reed’s plaything aboard _Enterprise_ , and that Gomez shared his bed there when he required something a little more challenging.  I suspect that whether she admits it or not, the general is irked by the fact that none of the major’s – er – forceful treatment succeeded in destroying his toy’s unaccountable regard for him.  Jealousy is beneath her, of course, but when I drew her attention to the fact that the same person was applying the gel to the patient _every_ _time_ , naturally she saw that this could not be allowed to continue.

On occasion, Alpha has seen fit to visit Sickbay while I am conducting my vivisection procedures.  I am therefore quite familiar with his look of attentive enjoyment, though whether this was on the score of his consort’s little human frailty or because of the trick that was about to be played on a minor nuisance, it would not be my place to speculate.  I myself had some ado to preserve the appropriate solemnity on my face while the new rank pip was applied to our startled little ensign’s uniform.  One would almost have thought she suspected she was in trouble!

Regrettably, I am _not_ prepared for the feral smile that graces Our Supreme Commander's face when he pauses in the doorway, nor for the way the new Lieutenant's shocked gaze passes from him to me and back again. My pleasure at her discomfort sours as my temporal ridges tingle unpleasantly and I have to concentrate on breathing slowly and steadily to suppress the instinct to expand my facial air sacs. Even though the threat display has evolved into a purely defensive mechanism among my people, I have never needed anyone to tell me that it would be enough to get me killed if I ever employed it in the presence of our generals. These days, General Gomez is far more likely to order her lackeys to shove me out an airlock than she is to expend the effort of ending me herself with one of her beloved blades; but I know, as surely as I know I need oxygen to survive, that Alpha's response would be far more hands-on, considerably bloodier, and infinitely less merciful. For a fraction of a second, I taste blood – my _own_ blood; then my temporal ridges ache sharply, as if someone has struck them with a hard object. When the strange sensations vanish, the only oddity remaining is the knowledge of their sudden onset and instant passing.

Leaving our newly-minted lieutenant to the pleasures of being inducted into her daily duties, I follow the generals out of the office hoping they do not notice my unusual reluctance.  As always, I receive no acknowledgement to my salute from Alpha.  Although I naturally know better than to show the slightest curiosity about him, during the course of preparing the zygote for insertion into the hapless ex-General Reed I secretly took the opportunity to study the structure of his DNA.  Even if I were unaware of the risks I had taken simply by doing this, I would need far more time than I have at my disposal to make a serious analysis of it.  Nevertheless, it confirmed me in my suspicion that at a physiological level he is no longer simply ‘General Hayes’.  When and how the changes took place I can only speculate, but the prospect of this mutation being introduced into the Human population is fascinating.

Simply fascinating!

The two of them walk back up the corridor.  General Gomez is a most attractive female, and their subtle physical interaction suggests that they mate frequently.  I wonder if she knows that her partner is no longer entirely human, but on the whole, this is unlikely; even if she might once have had her suspicions, I think now she is far too captivated by him and what he offers to give them any further consideration.  When T'Pol introduced the idea of mutiny against Captain Archer, back on _Enterprise_ , I admit that I was seduced by the prospect of being rewarded by my choice of females – it would probably be safest to bury the knowledge that the first female to spring to mind was then-Ensign Gomez.  Up till then, although I had naturally found her attractive it was an interest that I had to keep safely hidden. For all that he worked with me on the Agony Booth, I was quite certain that Major Reed would not have approved of my interest in his protégé.  By then, however, Reed was in Sickbay, hovering between life and death, and Gomez was there for the taking.

Had the mutiny succeeded, I believe that the rewards would have been most enjoyable....

I reach up to rub my temporal ridges as they begin to ache again.

Still.  I have done a good morning’s work already.  As I set off towards the Mess Hall for breakfast, it occurs to me that when our present little project is successfully completed, the newly appointed Lieutenant Cutler may have uncomfortable questions to answer regarding her ‘devotion’ to the patient.  Questions that she may wish to avoid having brought into the open, under General Gomez’s searching stare.  In terms of sexual attractiveness, she is of course not in the general’s league, but I have always believed in exploring every avenue that becomes available.

These agreeable reflections occupy me until the turbo-lift arrives.  Then, most _disagreeably_ , I find that it is already tenanted – by Commodore Tucker.

I had momentarily forgotten that for some mysterious reason, Tucker appears to feel some attraction to Cutler.  He can hardly object to her rise in the world, or indeed countermand the reassignment approved by the highest authorities short of the Empress herself, but I suspect that he will be no less alive to the real purpose behind it than she is.

It is surely too soon for him to have heard about it, but nonetheless I encounter a look from him that makes it surprisingly hard to hold on to my civil smile.  I flatter myself that I rarely indulge in flights of fancy, but it dawns on me now that the blue of his eyes is the colour of the ice in the heart of an Andorian glacier.

“Good _morning_ , Commodore!” I say jovially.  “I believe you may not have heard about the latest promotion among us?”

It would be inaccurate to say that his expression changes, except for the faintest tightening of his mouth. “I don’t remember authorizin’ any promotions lately,” he responds.

“Ah, but this recognition came from the highest authority,” I inform him happily.  “General Gomez absolutely agreed with me that Ensign Cutler’s talents were _entirely_ wasted administering mundane daily care to ... to the subject of our special project.  So I’m pleased to announce that from now on, _Lieutenant_ Cutler will have the responsible task of overseeing his welfare from the Shift Supervisor’s room.  She will be able to see that he is constantly cared for in a proper and conscientious way.

“A most deserved step up in the world, wouldn’t you say?”

For just one instant I fear that I have overplayed my hand.  Although the expression on the disfigured face opposite me still does not change, and nor does Tucker move a muscle, for the second time this morning, I have the strangest feeling that my life is suddenly in the most extreme danger – so much so, indeed, that I feel the most extraordinary urge to urinate.

“I’m sure _Loo-tenant_ Cutler’s real grateful she has people around her who think so much of her talents,” he replies at last, with heavy irony.  Just then the turbo-lift stops at C Deck, and he moves to leave, to my indescribable relief.  But halfway through the door he checks and looks back at me.  “I’m sure she knows that there are people watchin’ her back too.  People you really wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of.  I mean, not you _personally_ o’ course.  I know you’d always make absolutely sure nothin’ bad ever happened to her.”

This encomium is delivered with so much menace that I involuntarily step backwards.  “Of – of course, Commodore,” I stammer.  Unlike Alpha and Gomez, the commodore has no use for me, and thus, would not miss me if I were to have some unfortunate accident; which would surely happen in short order, if Ms Cutler were to have one first.  “I have every care for the lieutenant’s welfare!”

He inclines his head.  “I’m real glad to hear it. ‘Cause it wouldn’t matter what powerful friends anyone who hurt her might have if that happened.  You might want to pass that information around, just in case anyone needs to bear it in mind.

“See you around, Doc.” 

The closing of the turbo-lift door is the most welcome sight I have ever seen in my life.

Before I visit the Mess Hall, I now have to visit the bathroom.

Urgently.


	24. 23: Rendezvous (Commodore Charles Tucker)

  When Liz opens her door, I throw my arms around her and grope her ass, start kissing and sucking at her neck and whisper against her skin, "Invite me in, we need to talk." 

  She initially tenses at the contact. It's still hard for her, but she's smart and brave and almost immediately welcomes my touch. "Second base?" she gasps as she works on the zipper of my jumpsuit. "Third?"

  "Grand slam, baby girl," I tell her cheerfully. "Goin' all the way tonight. Gonna celebrate your promotion."

  It's a code we worked out when Phlox was first assigned to the station. ‘Which base’ is determined by the length of the conversation we need to have, though in this case, maybe I should have told her all nine innings.

  I don't know what Phlox's predecessor, Jeremy Lucas, might have done – quite possibly nothing – but he was removed and replaced without warning, the orders completely bypassing my chain of command and going directly to my head of security. The romantic angle for our little rendezvous was actually Cutler's idea, when she came to me offering to be my spy in sickbay. I try to use her as little as possible. She might be stronger than anybody imagines, but she still deserves my protection; and after what Reed did to her, I'm not entirely sure she understands that this kind of playacting isn't necessarily normal. It serves its purpose, and I’m not saying I don’t enjoy it, but sometimes I still feel like I'm taking advantage of her.

  "Oooh, sounds like fun," she giggles for the benefit of anyone who might be listening. "It's the last thing I wanted," she hisses in my ear. "I can't get to Malcolm now!"

  "I know it hurts, darlin'," I try to console her, though I have no idea _why_ she would want to be close to him; personally I’d rather be close to a carcass full of maggots. "But I have to admit, _I_ was happy to hear it. Anything goes wrong in Sickbay, an' that slimy Denobulan bastard will be busier than a cat on a tin roof tryin’ to cover up shit lookin' for someone to blame. If you can't get to Malcolm, you can't be accused of doin' anything to harm him."

  "But now, I could be named a co-conspirator if I'm on duty if something happens and don't see it on the monitors," she reminds me as her hand rubs my cock through my uniform – an action that brings it springing to attention, wanting more.

  "Yeah, but on the monitors, you'll have a chance to see it an' report it," I point out, squeezing one of her tits in return. "An' it's possible you'd be asked to review the footage to identify the person responsible, too. All things considered, you're still safer on the outside lookin' in."

  We give the watchers a show as we strip down and slip into bed. Liz puts the lights out, and then two pair of regulation briefs come flying out from under the covers. I tell you, if she lives long enough to retire from the service, Liz can have a second career doing voiceovers for pornos. Just the sounds she makes get me hard and aching, even though I have no real desire for her. She understands what she does to me and is good enough to give me a gentle hand-job as I kiss, suck, slurp, and whisper at her neck before continuing with the performance.  I know that she has no desire for me either, but she’s naked and next to me, and hell, I’m human.  For the sake of the cameras I act like I’m doing what a normal horndog would do when he climbs into bed with a naked woman, and though the cameras can’t see that she’s faking her reaction to what I’m apparently doing, I can’t help appreciating the view.  By the time I get back up and supposedly pull her on top of me to get into action, I’m more than ready for the clasp of her hand, safely hidden between our bellies.

  "I'm workin' on a plan to stop what they're doin' to Reed," I whisper to her, my voice wavering and dipping as the sensations ramp up.  For what the cameras can see, she’s grinding herself on me and pleasuring herself at the same time, and the changing pressures have my eyes rolling.  "I don't know if I can do it, an' I'm not sure what form it'll take if I can. There's a good chance you won't be happy with the result, an' I'm not involvin' you in it."

  "Mmmm," she moans, and I shudder as her thumb does something my dick _really_ likes. "I want to help," she hisses in my ear.

  "I…know-ow," I stammer. She has me right at the edge now. "But I don't wanna risk you. You're too important to me."

  That's something I'm free to admit to her. I don't know why, but I've always been able to be honest with her. She's like a vault where I can go to whisper my secrets, and when her door swings shut, I know they are safe.

  "But, Trip…"

  "Nuh…" I grab her wrist, afraid I might yell my answer, which would completely screw us both, in the figurative sense.

  "God, Lizzie!" I gasp, fighting to prevent my orgasm breaking loose too soon.

  When I let go of her hand, she stops what she’s doing, then reaches up to stroke my face and calm me. Once I can see straight again, she says, very quietly, "I'm Liz, not Lizzie. If you can't remember that, call me Elizabeth."

  I'm mortified. I don't deny I'm a kinky son of a bitch, but even I draw the line at incest. I start to apologize, but she captures my lips in a soft, sweet kiss.

  "No worries," she whispers. "But I do want to help Malcolm."

  "No buts," I tell her. I’m glad that the lights are off, because she’s too sharp for her own good sometimes and the last thing she needs to know right now is that I’m laying plans that might involve rescuing lover-boy from his fate by blowing him to pieces. "Dependin' on how things work out, I might need you a whole lot more than I do right now. So, until then, you just be ready to drop what you’re doin' an' go where I tell you an' do what I say on a moment's notice without even blinkin', got it?"

  "All right," she agrees. "I'll do anything you want to help him."

  For the love of God, I can't imagine why she gives so much as a hoot in hell about him, but she does.  She’s probably the only person I know who calls him by his given name, and even that has this soft sound I’ve never heard her use on anyone else’s.  Jeez, even ‘he’ and ‘him’ get the treatment when she’s referring to him.  Some of me thinks it’s cute, because it’s Liz, but the rest of me gets the creeps; exactly what did he _do_ to her that enslaved her like this?  We all saw the way he treated her, and even though most people just shrugged and walked on past, I definitely wasn’t the only one who thought he was a complete bastard.

  I can’t help realizing that if I do end up killing the guy it’ll do things to Liz that I can’t bear to think about, but if her broken heart’s the price for saving humanity from having a bonny blue eyed little bastard born to rule it, that’s a price I’ll have to make her pay.  I can only hope that one day she’ll forgive me, but I doubt it; lovers make good haters, and I still haven’t forgiven the Xindi for what they did to Lizzie.

  Satisfied that with Reed's potential release in mind she'll cooperate and stay out of the way until she's needed, I guide her hand back to my groin, and a few minutes later, my whole world dissolves into pulsing pleasure. 

  I rouse to the feeling of Liz stretched out beside me and cleaning me with a warm, damp cloth. It's pleasant, but not arousing because she isn't moaning anymore. I can tell by the chronometer on the wall that I've been here less than an hour. Physically, I'm still in a state of lethargic bliss, but my mind can't shake the last thing she said before she pushed me over the cliff.  And after what she’s just done for me, the thought that I’m planning to murder the guy she loves is weighing on my conscience.  More so because she thinks I’m planning to rescue him, and I’m not being honest with her.

 I’ve never asked her this before, but the sense of guilt prods me onwards.  Maybe she’ll give me some kind of bullshit reason that I can talk her out of.  Maybe she’s even deluding herself he cares about her, and painful as it would undoubtedly be, I can straighten her head out on that score.  Reed doesn’t care about anyone.  I’m not even sure the guy has the mental equipment to care about himself.  He’s a walking pulsar of hatred.

  "Liz, I’ll be honest: I just don’t get this.  _Why_ are you so loyal to him?" I ask softly into her hair. Much as I hate it, the fear that I'm being watched is never far from my mind.

  She tilts her head up, snuggles close, straddles my thigh, and rocks against me, stroking her sex sensually against the muscle. I hold her like I’m encouraging her, enjoying it, and not all of me is pretending; it’s a damn sexy feeling and she’s an attractive woman, for all I know she’s putting on a show for anyone who’s watching so they don’t wonder why I don’t just get up and leave now I’ve had what I came for. After her experiences with Reed, she's probably the one person in the Empire more aware of the threat of surveillance than I am.

  "People who are treated well in life don't become cruel," she whispers. "For him to be so barbaric he must have been hurt very badly."

  I scoff at that. "He's not some child with a broken toy, Liz," I argue. "He's been around enough to see that people _can_ be better. He saw how Roberts cared for you, that's why he killed him. It was clear to everyone on _Enterprise_ that Cap'n Forrest genuinely cared for Hoshi, an' even if it wasn't, the survivors from the bridge crew told us all how he chose to die with the ship to give her – an' coincidentally _them_ – enough time to escape.

 “Yeah.  I know bein’ nice mostly doesn’t get you anywhere, though here on this station I’m startin’ to find that’s nowhere near as true as people make out.  But there’s bein’ nasty because you have to be and there’s bein’ nasty because you choose to be.

  "He's old enough to choose, an' he chooses to be a hateful bastard."

  She nods thoughtfully, then asks, "How do you teach one of your engineers to do a task? Do you have them read about it, or do you have them do it?"

  "I make 'em do it," I reply, confused by this tangent but willing to follow her. "An' if they screw it up, they do it again until they get it right."

  "It's the same way in the medical sciences, although, when there’s time, we practice on virtual patients until we get it right," she says. "Do you agree that Malcolm understands more than just about anybody else in the Empire about pain and fear and humiliation and what they can do to a person?"

  "Hell, yeah," I agree easily, shifting my leg slightly to make the muscle inside it harder for her. "He's the man who invented the fuckin' agony booth."

  "And, do you think he got _that_ knowledge out of a _book_?"

She continues rocking, but though she’s intent on her pleasure I see her watching me, and in the lassitude of satiation I can’t muster my thoughts enough to cope with the idea that the arch-predator could have been born out of once being prey.

  "It … it's no excuse," I argue weakly. "If he's ever known … You …” I take one hand off her hips to wave it in frustration, because this is all so confusing.  I’m damned sure that if there ever was anyone who ever, _ever_ , maltreated Reed when he was vulnerable then they died slow and hard when he was powerful and finally got hold of them – and he _would_ have gotten hold of them, if he’d had to tear the Empire apart molecule by molecule to do it.  The only thing surer is that the facts of it even happening have been buried so deep that they might as well have been fed into the gravity well of a black hole, so this has just got to be wishful thinking on Liz’s part.  “You're sayin' you think he was a decent guy to begin with an' somethin' happened to him to make him the hateful bastard who 'welcomed' you aboard _Enterprise_ , the evil sumbitch who killed Martin Roberts – or at least got him to kill himself – an' tried to kill me. _I'm_ sayin' if there was ever any decency in him, at the very least he … he would have been kinder to you, if nobody else."  I snort with sour laughter at the idea of Reed being ‘kind’ to anyone, and add, “Well, at least he could’ve held off from punchin’ you black an’ blue while he was humpin’ you.”

  She purses her lips and sighs, and I can tell she's deliberately holding on to her temper. I'm not trying to make her angry, but I just don't understand how she can have so much as a single kind thought for that malicious little prick after the things he did to her.

  "Can I ask you something personal?" she says. "I don't need you to answer aloud, I just want you to think about it and understand that I'm not picking a fight. And I'm not judging you, either, I'm just making a point. I don't expect you to agree with me, but I'd like you to try to understand me, or at least consider where I'm coming from. Can you do that?"

  I give her a nod and a smirk.  Trying to lighten the mood just a little I tell her, "That's what I've been tryin' to do, darlin', _for_ _years_."

  My tactic works. She wrinkles her nose at me and punches me lightly in the shoulder. I feign injury, and we both chuckle, though as the sensations building inside her strengthen, the mask of concentration soon settles back across her face and there’s a few moments of breathing and grinding.

 But then she delivers the punch I’m not expecting. "When did you become the kind of man who would kick someone when he was down?"

 The question hits me like a brick in the head. I can only stare at her as she continues. "I know life in the Empire makes you tough.  You said it yourself, you have to do hard things to survive.  I can imagine you’ve had to do a whole lot of things you didn’t like doing but felt you had no choice in the matter.  But when did you become the kind of man who would find a _critically injured_ crewmate in an access tube, and take advantage of the opportunity to stomp him to death instead of getting him help?"

  "I _didn’t_ stomp him to death," I protest, albeit feebly.

  "Can you look me in the eye and tell me you’d have stopped short of killing him if I hadn't been there?"

  Her tone is soft, even gentle, not at all accusing, yet the question cuts me like a knife. My conscience betrays me before I can even think to try a half-convincing lie, and I drop my gaze.

 There are other things on my conscience too, things that I’ve kept pushing away because it wasn’t convenient for me to think of them.  I suppose, for example, that my occasional visits to the Imperial Comfort Houses back on Earth and the privately run brothels and bordellos elsewhere in the quadrant are damning enough, but when did I become the sort of man who would use a woman the way I use T'Pol on a daily basis?  Sure, she’s a convicted criminal – convicted first of trying to be loyal to her captain and later of trying to keep the power of the _Defiant_ out of the hands of a paranoid schizophrenic, power-hungry madman; which, in all fairness, was a lot safer for everyone in the Settled Worlds than letting Archer rise to power, and would have made her a Hero of the Empire if Hoshi hadn’t taken over or if T'Pol had been human. Sure, she used me to damage the cloaking device, but what other weapon did she have that could do the trick?

  When did I become the man who could actually give a fuck about the wheel of fortune grinding a cruel bastard like Reed into the ground and then go straight into grinding it over T’Pol on my own account?

_When did I become me?_

  "You see?" she says. "It happens to us all, Trip. The Empire, the Fleet, the very world we live in does _terrible_ things to us and turns us into people we don't even _like_ , let alone want to be, but we're helpless to stop ourselves because we're so busy just trying to survive that we've forgotten how to live any other way."

  "Oh, yeah? An' what horrible things have _you_ done?" I scoff. My heart physically aches to hear Liz including herself in with the likes of Reed and me when she uses words like 'us' and 'we'. I can't imagine her ever hurting anyone. She might be bat-shit crazy, but there's not a mean bone in her body.

  "I blame _you_ for things you can't prevent," she says, pausing, and I see the tears start to glisten in her eyes. "Because even though you won’t admit it, you’re a good guy, you know these things are wrong and there’s nothing you can do to stop them, and I _know_ it hurts you. I get so angry sometimes that I _want_ to hurt someone, and I know you'll let me do it. And I …” She gulps and takes a deep breath, like someone braving herself to admit something that’s going to hurt.  “I _let_ Martin stand up to Malcolm, even after Malcolm told me what he would do, because it felt _nice_ to have somebody stand up for me, and back then, nobody else cared – or would have dared do anything if they had!”

 I know she’s not blaming me personally, but I can’t help wincing.  Back then I didn’t care nearly as much as I should have done.  I was one of the ones who just shrugged and let her get on with it.  And though there probably wasn’t a lot I could have done to stop Reed even if I’d wanted to, I could at least have shown her a bit of kindness on my own account instead of just turning my head away.

 I know she sees me wince.  She strokes the side of my face and kisses me lightly to say that’s all in the past.  Which in a way makes me feel even worse, because I’m still planning to kill the man she loves, and she has no idea, because she trusts me.

  "I _know_ he's a horrible person, Trip," she goes on. "Really, I do. But I also know he wasn't _born_ that way anymore than you were born the kind of man to kick someone when he's down or I was born the kind of woman who hurts her friends to make herself feel better when she's angry and watches an innocent, ignorant _boy_ …"

  Her voice breaks here, and she begins to sob quietly.

  "God, Trip, Martin was still just a boy! He had no _idea_ what he was getting into! I watched a boy go off to his death just because I liked the feeling of having someone to defend me.  I knew Malcolm would kill him.  And even now I don’t know whether there wasn’t part of me that loved the feeling of having one man kill another over me, that loved feeling I had that much value to somebody.

“How do I start forgiving myself for that?"

  I pull her down to rest her head against my chest for a little bit and rub her back and run my fingers through her hair to comfort her while she cries herself out. I don't say it aloud, but it's a relief to know she has tears for someone other than Reed. Somehow, knowing she can weep for the people he's hurt makes her compassion for him a little easier to tolerate.

  After a few minutes, she sniffles, wipes her eyes, kneels up in bed, still astride my thigh, and ever aware of the watchers, begins riding me again.

  "Now, I'm not saying that what was done to Malcolm was any worse than anything that has ever happened to you," she says softly. "I don't _know_ what was done to him, but whatever it was, it shattered him, Trip. He wasn't equipped in any way to cope with it, not like you are. He _had_ to become what he is just to survive, and we _all_ know what that's like. I can forgive the man who hurt me, Trip, because my heart just breaks for the man who was so completely destroyed."

  Well, sonofabitch! I pull back so I can look into her eyes, and she's staring at me, but it's not me she's seeing as she rubs herself rhythmically against my thigh.

  I always thought Cutler was a little bit stupid. Well, a lot stupid sometimes, back in the day when she was just Reed’s whipped bitch, whimpering at his heels for him to kick when he felt like it. Never in a million years would I have expected her to say something so deep and wise. I think for a moment that maybe I should make a habit of asking people why they do things I don't understand. Then I think maybe I shouldn't, because I'm not sure I'd be ready for the answers, let alone some of the questions they might ask _me_.

  I'm already having a hard enough time imagining Reed could have already been hurt in any way that matters.  The idea that it could actually have been great enough to turn him into what he is will take some getting my head around – and even if I do, I’m not sure I’ll ever get to believe it. I finally decide not to try too hard right now, I might break something.

  It's a stretch, but I manage to get my uniform off the floor without disturbing her too much. I pull out a bracelet that I've been tinkering with for a couple of weeks and place it on her wrist. Surprised momentarily out of her concentration, she pauses to admire the gift.

  " _Never_ take this off," I tell her. "You wear it in the shower, you wear it in the gym, you wear it to bed, you wear it no matter who, what, when, where, or how you're fuckin'. If they let you back into Sickbay an' you can't wear it on your wrist, push it up to your elbow. If you're not allowed to have it on your arm, put it round your ankle. If it doesn't fit round your ankle, stick it in your bra and glue it to your tit. I don't care what you do, just never let it lose contact with your skin until I say you can take it off, got that?"

  "Hmm, sounds kinky," she giggles, and I'm not sure if she's being cute for the listeners or doesn't really understand.

  "It's a lot more serious than kinky," I tell her. "Promise me."

  "I promise," she says solemnly, "even if it turns my skin green."

  "Well, now, the casin' is solid duritanium, darlin'. It's not gonna do that."

  She admires the etching on it, and feeling a little self-conscious, I explain, "It's a Celtic knot called the Dara. I found it in the _Defiant_ 's database. It supposedly resembles the root structure of the oak tree. The oak was sacred to the ancient Celts, an' they would invoke it when they needed to summon fortitude an' tap into their supposedly vast divine inner resources."

  She kisses me on the nose and says, "It's perfectly lovely. Thank you."

  "I figured if you were gonna suddenly start wearin' a bracelet, it should be attractive an' meanin'ful."

  Somehow, I can't make myself tell her that I chose that specific design because it reminds me of how incredibly, unexpectedly strong I think she is, to have taken all that Reed and everything else has thrown at her and still be special and unique.  I watch her start grinding again, her gaze abstracted, her nipples hard with her growing arousal, her breath getting shorter and faster.

  I let her keep rocking against my thigh until she's finished, and when she comes, she makes a sharp yelping noise kind of like a puppy being kicked – a sound that kind of freaks me out a bit, though I try not to show anything. Then she snuggles against me with a soft little whimpering cry, and gives me those odd little licking kisses against my mouth that only she has ever done.

  I lie with Liz until she falls asleep. She rouses once, briefly, to tell me that Ensign Baird wants to talk to me, but it has to be secure, and it has to look like we just bumped into each other. What my Gamma Shift comm. officer could have to tell me that requires that level of discretion is beyond me, but he's always seemed level-headed enough. I promise Liz I'll indulge him and hope like hell he hasn't picked up any of my transmissions on the old diplomatic frequencies. Then, when Liz is finally snoring softly, I slip out of bed and get back into uniform. If I stay the night, the watchers might get the idea that she's more than just a fun-fuck, and that could put her in danger.

  On returning to my quarters, I’m greeted by a sudden sharp intake of breath from the direction of the bed. It's late, and I realize that if T'Pol was dozing, I might have startled her. Tired from the hour and relaxed from my visit with Liz, I tell her, "Go on back to sleep. I won't bother you tonight."

  I never would have expected her to disobey me, so I'm poleaxed when she launches herself off the bed at me. It's like she has six hands and two heads as she starts sniffing and licking at first my neck, then my groin. Then she's combing fingers through my hair and sniffing at it, which feels kind of nice, and then pressing her face hard into my groin again, which doesn't.

  Then I remember what a keen sense of smell Vulcan females have. I didn't wash when I left Liz, except luckily I used the toilet and washed my hands after that. I was planning to do the rest of me here.

  Might not have been the best idea ever.  Especially when I remember how she snarled when she thought Liz was getting a little too familiar with me.

  Then she turns her head and gets a whiff of my thigh. When she turns again to glare up at me, I suddenly think I know how the rabbit must feel when it's spotted by the fox.

  For the first time since she became my property, she uses her superior strength against me.

 She’s my _slave_.  For even looking at me the wrong way I could have her shot out an airlock and no-one would even raise an eyebrow.  But right now I don’t even think of that.  I’m so dumbstruck I can’t think of anything.

  First, she tears the leg of my uniform open right at the spot where Liz rode me, and starts to suck. It's painful, but when I try to push her away, she grips both of my wrists in one small hand, and she's strong enough that I can't pull free. Admittedly, I don't try as hard as I might, because despite the fact that I know she's leaving marks that will hurt in the morning and might even make walking awkward, it feels good in a weird, hurting kind of way. Licking and sucking and biting, she cleans the whole area until there can't possibly be a trace of Liz Cutler left on my skin.

  Then I'm reminded of just how fast Vulcans can move. Satisfied that she’s gotten rid of the alien scent of Liz from the skin of my thigh, she stands up, rips my uniform, undershirt and vest down the middle with one pull, hooks her thumbs into my drawers and socks on the way down, and has me naked in two seconds flat. I'm still stumbling around in confusion with my dick bobbing in front of me when she grabs my wrists again, pulls them behind my back, and shoves me down on the bed.

  Massaging my privates with the flat of her free hand, she leans over me and in a voice that makes me tremble, says, "If I am your slave, then you are _my master_."

  "Don't leave any marks that my uniform won't cover," I tell her, but I'm not entirely sure I shouldn't be begging, 'Oh, God, please don't!'

  I’d thought I was pretty well spent after Liz’s kind efforts, but hell, this is a whole different ball game and I’m suddenly more than ready for a double-header.

  When her mouth comes down on me again, all I can manage is an inarticulate scream.


	25. 24: Jigsaws (General Malcolm Reed)

The chemicals are withdrawn.

Presumably something is done to mitigate the withdrawal effects, because when it finally dawns on me how stoned I’ve been for the past however-long I can only marvel that I’m not enjoying a constant procession of hallucinations dancing across the ceiling.  A steady stream of undulating Denobulan doctors maybe, clad in hula skirts and outsize leis.

...Or perhaps not.  There’s a limit to what a sick man’s brain can be asked to bear.

I frequently find myself watching for one particular face. I'm not sure who it is, but I will know when I see the person. Deep down, I am certain I should _already_ know this one for whom I watch and wait, but the memories are so vague that in my more lucid moments, I'm not even sure the individual is real. Still, if he or she exists, there may be one person whom I can convince to help me. So, when I am mostly myself, I spend my time calculating what I can say or do to gain a desperately needed ally. When the mists and cobwebs overtake me, my eyes roll about in my head, searching Sickbay for the kind face with the compassionate eyes that make me feel safe and … cared for.

I’d say ‘cared about’, but that would be pushing it.

My re-evolution from goldfish to man is not pleasant, mentally or physically.  Apart from the growing burden pressing on my internal organs, there are periods when my very bones ache and my head feels as if it’s going to collapse inward on itself like a black hole.  But each time thought struggles back out of that colossal gravity well there’s more of it, and more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of my reality emerge.  Slowly, with intense effort, I begin to fit together the pieces of what has been done to me.  Needless to say, they soon form into a very disagreeable picture.

There’s no merciful tickle at my wrist now.  Not that I’d want it; on the contrary.  Even in the moment when the memory of what I saw when I craned up to see the ‘butterfly’ comes crashing back onto me in all its horror, I don’t turn away from it.  I replay it, analysing it coldly while the picture passes before me frame by frame.

I’ve never had any reason to get involved with pregnant women.  They’re a nuisance and a liability, and anyone on a starship who was stupid enough to evade the contraception regimen and get their belly filled could expect to be got rid of in short order (unless they were particularly vital to the ship, in which case they got a termination followed by a demotion).  So my experience of the business end of the mechanics of human reproduction’s lamentably thin, but I seem to remember from sex-ed classes at school that pregnancy lasts about nine months.

‘Midpoint of the third trimester’, Phlox said.  That makes me...

...Just over eight months pregnant.

I face the fact stonily.  In my belly the product of all this Machiavellian medicine squirms vigorously, while the latest acolyte runs a medical scanner across it and beams at the readings.  One thing I do remember is that the woman’s pelvis is broader so that a baby can sit in it comfortably.  For possibly the first time in my life I feel bitter satisfaction at the fact that for a bloke I’ve always been on the small side. The narrow bones of my pelvis must feel like a concrete strait-jacket.

_Good!_

No doubt the pious would throw up their hands in horror if they could read what’s in my mind as I stare at the ceiling.  But then it’s not like I ever set out to take up a career as an incubator.  Nobody _asked_ me if I wanted to be turned into some kind of hermaphrodite freak to hatch out a horror.  At a guess, nobody will even give a shit if I don’t survive the experience, except perhaps one person, who may or may not be real. (I am beginning to lean towards _not_ because, though I have remembered that she was a woman and that I referred to her as the Nice One in my mind, I haven't seen her since the day they removed me from the tank; and surely, if she actually existed and she cared for me as I believed, she would be here now, when I’m aware of my situation and helpless to do anything about it.  Surely, if I mattered to her at all, she’d show herself now that some form of meaningful recognition is possible?) So you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t turn into a cooing ball of mush at the thought that I’m having a baby, because even apart from the minor personal inconvenience to myself, I can guess exactly where this is going. Actually I don’t even have to guess; now and again back in the day _breeding_ was mentioned. I remember how thoughtful Alpha looked once at the idea that introducing our own genes into the population might be more efficient than putting subjects through the specialised conditioning that we endured....

The baby is valuable in and of itself, of course.  I strenuously doubt whether Sato has the faintest idea of its existence, because there can only be one queen bee in a hive.  Up till now Em’s remained quiescent, but as soon as she has a child she’ll be absolutely deadly; Sato’s survival will probably be measurable in hours. If not minutes.

But its greatest value will lie in its genetic makeup.  I don’t know what happened to Alpha, I’ve never asked because I was quite sure he wouldn’t tell me.  But if his genetic material is still compatible with an ordinary human’s (and it seems that it is, unless Phlox did some tinkering with the zygote before it was injected into me) then this baby is an almost limitless source of gametes....

 _But why use **me**? _ Even as I castigate myself savagely for my own weakness, part of me wails it in desolate reproach.  _Couldn’t they have used someone else? **Anyone**_ _else?_

 _Why **not** you?_ The answer comes with the brutal cold of interstellar space.  _You were a potential threat.  What if the time came when **you** thought about reproducing?  So they could have killed you – but instead they made you useful._

_They let you live._

Still, it might have been nice to have had some choice in the matter.

As a passing thought, I wonder if the Nice One, whoever she may have been – if she was real at all – would have helped me kill myself to spite them if I’d found some way to ask her; or whether, if she was as kind as she seemed, she’d have tried to convince me that my life was worth preserving in any state.

Back on Earth, there’s a type of wasp that stings and paralyses a spider, into which it lays an egg before dragging the wretched victim away to bury it alive as a living larder for the growing larva inside it.  Depending on whether my potential ally exists or was just a product of my terrified, hallucinogen-fuelled imagination, my chances of survival may be fractionally better than that spider’s, though the experience is analogous in many ways.  But instead of producing a single wasp, I have been recruited to produce the first of a whole new generation.

The Army of the Dispossessed was a terrifying resource when it was finally moulded into a weapon.  Imagine that multiplied a hundred, a thousand times; cloned, even, and introduced into the human gene pool through a thousand routes.

Bonny, bouncing, blue-eyed babies, obedient killers from the cradle....

Well.  There’s nothing I can do about it from here, at least not on my own, and even as I catch myself thinking that there may be help for me yet, I curse myself. It’s been more than two weeks, and ‘the Nice One’ has yet to appear.  While my reasoning processes were away with the fairies I was allowed a careful measure of freedom, but now I’ve been allowed to have them back my captors are well aware of the threat I pose.  My silence is no reassurance, nor should it be, for all that I hope against hope that if my angel is just a figment of my imagination and there’s no help there, then sooner or later someone, somewhere, is going to make a single tiny slip.

Because if they don’t, my time is running short.  My male body was never designed to cope with the stresses and strains of childbirth, even when I was fully fit, and although the uterus that Phlox transplanted into me seems to have coped well enough, probably with the help of some advanced immunosuppressants, I don’t know how well it’s all tied together when it comes to finally expelling the brat.  He’s certainly not bothering to calm my maternal qualms on that score, not that I’d believe the slimy shite if he said it’d slip out as easily as a spent dick.  Whether he’s aware of this or whether he just can’t be arsed or whether it’s all part of the payback to keep me wondering is moot.  I don’t even waste the effort of hoping for it.

Strangely enough, though, when sheer boredom finally sends me to sleep, the dreams come back – the dreams that I had in the fish-tank.  I walk down the corridors I recognise, interacting with familiar strangers in a way that seems so uncannily natural that every waking plunges me into a fresh welter of disappointment and rage.  In particular, my easy camaraderie with one person among them all tears me open; she’s my subordinate, my deputy, but she calls me her _patrón_ and we talk as people do who have a deep mutual regard and unswerving trust in one another.

Trust.  I’d never have believed that I had such a thing in anyone, but too late I realise that I slid into the trap almost without knowing.  And when its jaws closed on me, I found the pain of betrayal more than I could bear – a discovery that makes me want to writhe with humiliation and fury at my own idiotic naïveté.  What the fuck had I thought I was _doing_ , falling in love!

And this is where it’s led me.  Unless events intervene, or a mystery woman who is looking more and more like the creation of a particularly fevered outburst of wishful thinking actually materialises, I have two prospective fates: to die giving birth to a nightmare, or to survive it and live on as the one-size-shags-all sex toy of the two people I...

Self-pity has never been my forte.  I’ve no time for people who wallow in their own misfortune and I certainly wouldn’t number myself among them; time spent repining is time that could have been so much better spent in planning revenge.  But for all my determination to conquer the grief I’ve always seen as a sign of weakness, I feel as though the core of me that used to be fire has turned to ice.  Not that I’m not perfectly capable of killing still; it’s just an utterly different feeling inside me, where an arctic wind blows across the featureless wasteland.

Maybe it’s better this way. Cold makes one numb. When one is numb, one cannot feel. One can think without the taint of emotion. One can plan with a clear head. One does not feel pain.

Or regret.

_Some say the world will end in fire,_

_Some say in ice._

_From what I’ve tasted of desire_

_I hold with those who favor fire._

_But if it had to perish twice,_

_I think I know enough of hate_

_To say that for destruction ice_

_Is also great_

_And would suffice.*_

=/\=

So time passes; once again endless, featureless time, though I no longer bother to count it.

Nobody makes mistakes.  Alpha is in control, and his will pervades Sickbay, just as it probably pervades the entire station.  If the inhabitants thereof weren’t terrified of me they’d certainly be terrified of him, and so they should be.  Although naturally somewhat disappointed by the religious fervour with which his commands are followed, I’m certainly not surprised.

But machinery is incapable of feeling self-preservatory terror, and it’s a machine that gives me the first – possibly the only – break in the routine.

I’m drowsing, because I’m bored and because my body has had enough sleep for the time being and because I’m stuck on a particular refinement for my wonderful machine for breaking subjects’ finger-bones into micron-sized shards.  People come and go all the time, and I wish I could take no notice of them, apart from making a note of those who will follow Phlox into the prototype when I get it set up; but even against my will, I still look into every new face that presents itself because some addled part of my mind still believes _she_ might be real, the one who cared for me and was kind and might be convinced to help me.  As for the growing list of test subjects for my marvellous device, there are certain members of the laboratory staff who feel entitled to take liberties, and that’s another of my mottoes, _Take what you want, says Reed.  And then pay for it._ (I’ve a notion it’s not entirely original, but what the hell, _I_ like it, and that’s what counts.)

So, someone’s taking notes and looking at the readings on the monitor above my head, and I’m not taking any notice, when suddenly this alarm goes off.

Obviously it’s getting to the point now when everyone’s on tiptoe waiting for The Start, so people rush in from all directions and even I sit up and take notice – not literally of course, because I’m still shackled hand and foot, but you know what I mean.  But I could have told them that it wasn’t The Start, because to the best of my knowledge I should get some kind of warning.  If nothing else, I believe there’s something about thinking you’ve pissed yourself, and presumably things would start being damned uncomfortable.  Now, I’ll admit that now I’m this bloated, discomfort has become my ground state, but I suspect that if I were about to become a doting dad (or something along those lines) there would be some noticeable increase.

Which there isn’t.

People flap and twitter and look at the readouts and at the monitor, and glare at me like it was all something I organised just to pass the time and be an arse.

Chance would be a fine thing, say I.  Well, I _don’t_ say, because I don’t talk, but I think it.

Eventually they work it out between them that the machine’s throwing a wobbly.  That’s not something they want to have happening at such a critical juncture in The Procedure, now is it? So an urgent call is put out for the Head Hobgoblin himself.  No less a personage than Commodore Tucker will suffice to check a faulty relay in the wondrous artefact constantly monitoring the welfare of this modern-day Damien whom I am shortly to have the privilege of bringing into the world.

Oh, ecstasy.

Still glaring reproachfully at me like it’s _my_ bloody fault the machine’s going off on one, everyone disperses again, leaving me to my blissful anticipation.

Tucker must have been at some distance, because it’s about half an hour before he strides into Sickbay.  He hasn’t been in since the day I was dunked into the fishpond, as far as I know, and I don’t suppose he’s missed me any more than I’ve missed him.

Still, even though there can hardly be any doubt that he knows full well what was going on, I suppose seeing it in the flesh must come as a bit of a shock.  I know from the sound of the booted feet that it’s not one of the medical team who’s come in, and I hear his stride faltering just fractionally.

But business is business, and surrounded by a flotilla of anxiously quacking medical staff he comes to check the machine.  It’s still squawking intermittently, and I’m getting a bit tired of the noise by now.  I hope he’ll sort it out and then bugger off without pausing to exchange sweet nothings; I’ve got other things to think about right now than listening to Tucker’s vivacious wit getting its annual airing at my expense.

Ever the charmer, he dispenses a series of snarls that send his accompanying flotilla scattering in all directions, and then bends to start running diagnostics.  He doesn’t say anything to me and I’m thankful for small mercies.  With any luck he’ll shut the damn thing up in a couple of seconds and fuck off out again.

The seconds elapse.  The machine keeps beeping.  I lose track of where I was in trying to iron out that exasperating flaw in my ingenious patented digit-shatterer, and scowl at the ceiling.  I’ve got the head of the Imperial Corps of Engineers squatting beside me and here am I stuck with a problem he could probably sort out in five minutes flat if he put his mind to it.

Wonder if I should mention it, just while he’s here?

Perhaps not.

He has various parts of the machinery disembowelled and is breathing exasperation.  Finally he comes to the conclusion that he needs to check something in the monitor above me, and stands up to lean across.  As he does so, he glances down at me.  I have no idea why.

After all this time it’s almost a physical shock to have someone meet my eyes so directly, as though I’m a person rather than a function – even if I’m a person he loathes.

I can’t see anyone else in my necessarily limited field of vision.  I have time for three words, and they’d better be good ones; unfortunately ‘Get me out of this’ has two too many, and besides, I wouldn’t give him that much of a laugh.

They’re out before I even know what they are, breathed so low I’m not even sure he’ll hear them.  “End of Humanity.”

“What was that?” asks one of the doctors sharply.

Tucker’s eyes are mid-sky blue; compared to Alpha’s, they seem dark.  His ruined face twists with derision.  “Pity – for _you?”_ And he spits before getting back on with the work he’s been called here to do.

My rediscovery of the noble art of communication causes a small stir of consternation.  Even Phlox is summoned to hear about it, and evidently feels brave enough to attempt to interrogate the recipient.

He’s picked the wrong one in Tucker.  The engineer just pauses and glowers.  “Sure he spoke to me.  He said, ‘Have some pity.’” A huff of a laugh.  “Fine thing for _that_ little bastard to be talkin’ about pity.  I’m just surprised he knows what the word means.”

There’s a nervous little titter from those listening.  Phlox stares down at me and then turns to someone else.  “Was that what you heard?”

I hold my breath.

“It – may have been, Doctor. The – the – he spoke very quietly.  But it sounded like that.”

For the second time in five minutes I have someone looking directly at me.  But there never was a time when Phlox could meet my eyes for long, and even now I’m at this nadir of my fortunes I see a nervous twitch run across his face as I stare coldly back at him.

I’m not going to say anything and he knows it.  And with me in this ‘delicate condition’ there’s no way he’d dare use any, shall we say ‘forceful’ means of encouraging me to co-operate.  So that leaves him the option of challenging Tucker’s version of events; and Commodore Tucker must be a very powerful chap these days, in charge of Jupiter Station and I daresay what else beside by now, given the scale of his success with it.  So if I were Phlox I’d just nod and accept it.

And this is indeed what he does, though he covers his minor defeat by demanding truculently whether the machine will take long to fix – given the fact that it’s still yelping intermittently, it obviously isn’t fixed yet.

“You want it fixed or botched?” Tucker asks with a sneer.  “I can shut it up straight away or I can make sure it stays shut up till it’s actually wanted.  Wouldn’t do for Sleepin' Beauty here to go into labour an' nobody notices till it’s too late, would it?”

Well, obviously that’s absolutely the last thing Phlox or anyone else wants to happen.  Now they’ve all invested this much time and effort into producing Damien, even I shudder to think what Alpha would do to every man jack of the team who allowed something to happen to it.  So Phlox hurriedly opts for the most sensible option of keeping his insides where they are, and nods chastened approval of the modifications Tucker tells him need to be made to the machinery to make it ‘five hundred per cent foolproof’.

(Personally I’d make it a lot more than five hundred percent considering the number of fools there are working in Sickbay, but there you go, no-one’s asking for _my_ opinion.)

The modifications require parts that need to be fetched, so Tucker departs to fetch them.  Since his neck will also be on the line for any failure, I’m not in the least surprised that he goes for them himself rather than entrust the task to an underling.  In about ten minutes he returns with them, and permits Phlox to examine them minutely in case anything toxic or explosive or similarly unamiable has been introduced into them; obviously I can’t see this process, but I hear the flat, sarcastic, Floridian drawl that asks if he’d like to jump up and down on them too, just to make sure they’re not broken.

This kind offer is not taken up of course, but though as Tucker sets about replacing parts of the machinery he embarks on a completely unnecessary explanation of what he’s doing, it’s couched in so much jargon that I’m fairly certain he loses Phlox after the first half-dozen words.  When the good doctor and I were co-operating in the construction of the Agony Booth, our spheres of expertise were very clearly separated: he was the biologist and I was the engineer.  When we met in the middle, as obviously we had to do on a fairly regular basis, we each had to exercise some care to ensure the other understood what were sometimes quite specialist concepts.  Only by ‘dumbing it down’ for the other’s benefit could we ensure that we were speaking the same language, and irksome as it was for me (and probably for him too), there was no way around it.

Vanity – especially as they’re surrounded by his acolytes, who presumably think the sun shines out of his arse – prevents Phlox from admitting he’s hopelessly adrift on this sea of technological terms.  I, on the other hand, am no slouch in the engineering department.  True, my specialist areas are explosives and weaponry, but despite the fact that Tucker’s so voluble that even I have to scramble to keep up, I _can_ make sense of what he’s saying.

Well.  That’s perhaps the wrong way of putting it.  I can’t exactly ‘make sense’ of what he’s saying, because some of it doesn’t actually make any sense at all to start with.  It’s the most extraordinarily fluent gibberish.

But as a Security specialist I’m expert at picking up buried code, and almost at once I realise that the technobabble spewing from our Head of Engineering isn’t actually aimed at Phlox at all.

It’s aimed _at me_.

From the moment he lied about what I’d actually said to him, I’ve been torn between hope that he was keeping himself out of trouble by not getting even remotely involved in speculation about what this charming little project was aimed at, and fear that he was simply waiting to report my treasonous announcement to Alpha himself.  There’s also, of course, the possibility that he really had misheard what I’d said.  After all, I couldn’t see if anyone was close by and therefore had to speak so fast and quietly I was risking him not hearing me properly, if indeed he heard me at all; if he didn’t hear what I was saying the first time he certainly wouldn’t have the option of asking me to repeat myself.

If he’s reported me to Alpha, then there probably won’t be any immediate repercussions.  After all, I’m in a ‘delicate condition’, and the welfare of the thing in my belly is the trump card, protecting me from practically anything.  But once it’s born, then my outlook could be very, _very_ different.

He still could be playing a double game, of course.  He could have reported to the authorities, received his orders, and be now embarking on paying out the rope for me to hang myself a dozen times over.

Trust Tucker?  Me?  Just put your head back on the right way round, will you?  I’m through trusting anyone.

He leaves afterwards with a jeered ‘Enjoy the rest of your life – what there is of it!’ hurled in my direction.  But though the pieces of information I managed to pick out from the tide of technobabble were scattered and sparse at best, when I’m finally able to assemble this second puzzle into something that makes some kind of sense, I discover he’s said enough to leave me very, very thoughtful.

Now, where do we go from here?

* * *

 

_Author's Note from Mandassina:_

* As I was proof-reading this chapter in preparation for posting I recalled the poem "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost. It seemed both apt because it suits Mal's mental state so well, and ironic because Frost's usual subject matter and imagery was very focused on nature while this entire story takes place in what is basically a giant tin can (Jupiter Station) and is all about destroying a man in the most unnatural ways imaginable. Also, if it comes to fruition, Alpha and Em's plot may well fundamentally change the nature of humanity. I love being subversive!


	26. 25:Camaraderie (Lieutenant Richard Kelby)

The mess hall is packed. I hate getting my lunch when it's so busy, but I didn’t have much of a choice today. The Chief had to reschedule our usual morning meeting to 13:00, and I have a full schedule with my team after that, so this is the only chance I'll get to eat until end-of-shift.

He's been doing that a lot lately, rescheduling, I mean, and sometimes he has to cut things short, but we still talk every day, face to face, just like he promised. I've told him I understand how busy he is and that it's all right if he needs to cancel, but he just shook his head and insisted that he was going to make up for how he treated me in the past. When I told him he already had, he just smiled and looked really pleased, but told me he'd be the judge of that. I didn't press him after that because, honestly, I like being able to talk things over with him. It gives me confidence to know he approves of what I'm doing because I know I am on the right track, and it makes me feel safe when he points out my mistakes – which is happening less and less often – because I know he won't let me go so far astray that I hurt myself or anyone else.

I scan the room anxiously for an open table. I know this place is a world away from _Enterprise_ , but I still get nervous when I have to ask if I can join an already-seated group. Even at Utopia Planitia, I more than once had the humiliating experience of being flatly refused and had to slink off to my quarters to dine alone. I much prefer being asked, rather than being the one who is asking, if a seat is taken.

"So there I left him, half bent-over, holding a 30-kilo refrigeration unit…"

I gather Mike Rostov has been hazing the new recruits again. He certainly has developed a reputation for mischief that precedes him. Oddly enough, even the victims of his pranks seem to get quite the laugh out of them, and it seems he uses them as teachable experiences. I have a couple of newbies on my team who have rotated in from the salvage operation, and they had tales to tell for the ones who hadn't been there yet. Every recruit spends two weeks in salvage, two weeks in construction, and two weeks in maintenance and sanitation. I know the Chief wishes he could have twice that time, but the Empire needs maintain a balance between training its engineers and staffing its engine rooms.

I can see both sides of the question. I was thrown out there as cannon fodder halfway through my official training, so these kids are already better prepared than I was when they get here, and then they have the Chief to oversee their final polishing before they're deployed. Every now and then, I feel a little bitter about how I got screwed when I was their age, but I can't be too jealous because it all seems to be working out to my benefit now. I realized very quickly after I got here that being able to talk things over with and learn from Trip Tucker, up close and personal, every day, is the opportunity of a lifetime. I'm incredibly lucky the Chief is the kind of man who can admit his mistake in underestimating me – and forgive mine in undermining him – to give me another chance.

I finally spot an open table, well in the back, half buried in a potted palm, and make a beeline for it. I might still eat alone because it's not a very good place to sit, but at least no one can send me away like some stray come begging.

"Rich! Come join us," Mike calls out to me.

I almost stumble to a stop and look around to find him waving me over to where he, Liz Cutler and Anna Hess are seated near one of the viewports. This is unexpected. An unsolicited invitation. I accept dubiously, but without hesitation.

"Hey, guys," I say as I take the seat beside Liz. "Thanks for asking me."

Anna gives me a smile and a nod, glances at my tray, and says, "Is that banana cream pie? How did I miss that?"

"They were just putting it out as I went through the line," I say. It's a large piece, and she looks like she would really love to have some. I know what the Chief would do.

I cut it in half across the middle. "Here, have some," I offer, holding the plate toward her. "It's more than I need."

Her whole face positively lights up and she gives me the loveliest smile.

"Thanks, Rich!" she says gratefully as she scrapes the half with the crust onto her own plate. I think I just made her day, and it feels good. Really good.

"My pleasure," I tell her, and it truly is. "So, what's up?"

"Oh, I was having a little fun with Mortensen today," Mike says.

"Big blonde kid, built like a brick outhouse?" I ask.

Mike nods and grins. "Yeah, that's the one. Looks like he could bench press an ox."

"I know who you mean," I say. "You're pretty brave to be messing with that one."

"Ah, he's a sweet kid," Mike says. "But he needs to learn not to be so gullible! We're dismantling the _Kaiser,_ and he and I were moving the mini fridge out of the captain's quarters. I had him absolutely convinced that if he dropped it or set it down ever so gently or even _breathed_ on it, the corroded circulation tubes would crumble to dust, releasing the volatile gas, which would burn his skin off, and then blow half the station to kingdom come if he dropped it and the metal sparked when it hit the deck…"

"Michael! You should be ashamed of yourself," Liz chides him gently.

"I was just teasing him a little," he defends himself, "and teaching him a valuable lesson in an environment where it's safe to learn it."

Liz scoffs and says, "It sounds like you frightened and humiliated him."

"And I bought him a beer afterward and made it up to him," Mike says. "And I don't mess with any of my kids unless I know they can take it. If it's any consolation, he reminded me that he's quite a bit bigger than I am and that revenge is a bitch."

"Some of those old reefer units do contain volatile gases," I tell Liz as I reach for the salt and pepper.

Mike winks, bringing me in on the joke, but Anna tells her, "That would be the high efficiency units we use to cool engines. A personal fridge, not so much."

"Either way, he should have known better," I tell Liz, feeling compelled to defend Mike. "It's standard protocol and just good common sense to drain volatile and toxic fluids before moving a unit containing them so as not to risk a spill."

I look to Mike and say, "If you got him on that, then he had it coming."

"Thank you," Mike says expressively. "That's what I'm trying to get these two to understand. I really just wanted to see exactly how strong he is, so I left him standing there…"

Here he mimes the act of holding a 0.12 cubic meter mini-fridge at arm's length, even making his arms tremble a little with the supposed strain as he talks. It's an awkward thing, a little larger than a foot locker and as heavy as an average ten-year-old. I couldn't hold out something like that for very long, and I doubt Mike could; but I bet Mortensen could manage for a while.

"…thinking he literally held all our lives in his hands while I was out in the corridor thundering around looking for the kit I supposedly needed to drain it and screaming for my 1.25 hyperspanner, which I had deliberately left on top of the fridge, right under his nose, and he was too scared holler to tell me it was there."

Anna is grinning and shaking her head. Even Liz is now smiling slightly as Mike pantomimes his story while he's telling it. Once again I am struck by the difference in this place compared to _Enterprise_. Back then, people were too busy plotting outright sabotage or guarding against it to indulge in any frivolities such as practical jokes.

"Finally, as he lost his grip on the unit, he bellowed like a bull and came charging out of the captain's quarters, yelling, 'Run! Run for your lives! It's gonna blow!'"

Mike's shout gets the attention of about half the people in the mess hall, but, did I mention his reputation? Most of them just shake their heads and go back to eating their meals. Way in the back, I see Mortensen, who's so big he even sits taller than most people, turning bright red, but he's grinning as he throws part of a roll at the face of one of his buddies who seems to be teasing him. He may have been briefly humiliated and momentarily terrified, but I think Mike is right, he took it all in stride and didn't suffer any permanent psychological damage.

"He went barrelling down the corridor heading for the turbolift, right into about twenty people who had realized I was up to something and gathered to watch," Mike continues. "Big as he is, he knocked about half of them down like bowling pins and was almost to the 'lift before he realized that no one else was running."

"When did he realize you would have evacuated the bay before trying to drain the unit?" I ask.

It's another standard protocol, one that's been there all along, but the Chief was the first boss in as long as I've been in the Imperial Fleet to actually enforce it. These new kids have no idea how good they have it with regards to their health and safety now that Commodore Tucker is in charge of the Corps of Engineers.

"I'd say about the time he quit running," Mike says, "because he came back to us grinning and blushing bright red and told me, 'You got me, sir,' and reminded me what they say about revenge."

Looking at Cutler, he adds, "And he was a good sport about it, Liz. I never would have done it if I didn't know he would be. Then we used it to start a long talk with the whole team about protocols and procedures and why they're in place and how to _properly_ handle a situation when they haven't been followed."

Anna chuckles. "I guarantee you he will never try to move another reefer without checking _for himself_ that it's been drained of coolant."

"And if it's not, he won't panic," I add. Looking at Liz, I continue, "That lesson will carry through to anything that contains toxic components. There's a good chance it will save his life one day."

Liz nods thoughtfully and finally concedes, "You might have a point, as long as he wasn't upset by it afterwards."

"I don't think he'd have threatened Mike with payback if he was upset in the way that you mean. To hear my kids talk, I think some of them view it as a rite of initiation or a badge of honor and feel like they've finally been approved once they survive one of his practical jokes," I point out. "So, let me ask you guys something."

"What's up?" Mike asks, leaning in like he's really interested, and I've been here long enough to realize that he is. Sometimes, even the littlest things astonish me when I realize how different they are to what I have known in the past.

"Have any of you noticed the Chief being a little out of sorts in the past few weeks?" I ask.

"How do you mean?" Anna asks.

"I don't know," I say. "Distracted, rushed, kind of cranky, but trying real hard to be polite. Maybe changing plans on you at short notice, and apologizing repeatedly for screwing up your whole day? Not that I mind. I'm grateful for what he's doing for me, but it doesn't seem like him to do something like that."

The three of them share a look then, and I know something is up, because it's not a look of confusion. It's a look that says, 'What the hell do we tell him?'

"It started about a month ago," I press. "Phlox called him out of our morning meeting, and he was pissed off. I saw him later that day, and he wasn't angry anymore, but he was real thoughtful and unusually quiet." Looking at Liz, I continue, "Do you recall anything happening in sickbay that he had to personally take care of that might have upset him?"

She shrugs and looks bewildered, fidgets with the duritanium bracelet around her wrist. She's a lousy actress, but I don't call her on it.

"If I did remember anything, I probably couldn't tell you about it due to patient confidentiality, Rich," she says quietly.

"No, I suppose not," I concede, "but you know, now that I think about it, there was something else a while ago. When I finished my first assignment here, that giant fish tank, he said I did a real job on it, but he sounded unhappy about it. Any of you know what was up with that? I never got to see it in use, so I don't even know what it was for. I thought it might have had something to do with one of Phlox's projects."

I look at Liz again, and she literally squirms in her seat.

"Look, Rich," Anna sighs, and I turn to face her, letting Liz off the hook, "At any given time, there are probably as many as fifty top-secret projects under way on this station. Those who know about them, can't talk about them. Those who don't know, shouldn't speculate. You need to learn not to take it personally when you're left out of the loop on something. It isn't fair of you to pressure Liz with questions about what's going on in sickbay. Even if it isn't secret, it's still confidential."

"Hey, no pressure," I tell them, as sincerely as I can, "and I'm not taking it personally. I'm just, well, a little concerned about the Chief. Something seems to be upsetting him, and it seems to have something to do with Phlox, that's all."

"Rich, the Chief can take care of himself," Mike says. "He wouldn't have got to where he is if he couldn't, and if he does need help, he knows who to ask. The best thing you can do for him is to just keep up the good work and stay out of trouble. Now, you're starting to make friends here. Don't screw it up by pestering people with questions you _know_ they can't answer."

I remember the Chief saying something to me about getting more answers than I want. That was my first day here, when he assigned me to the fish tank project. I nod and look at each of them in turn. I want them to understand that I'm not just being nosy.

"I get what you're saying, Mike, so I won't ask any more questions," I say. "I'll tell you this, though. I think you all know the Chief saved me by forgiving me for that interview and bringing me back here for training. I owe him my life. This place is better than any other post I've been assigned in the Fleet. I owe him a debt of thanks for that, too. Getting to know him these past few months, I've learned to respect him. I know he's a good guy, and I genuinely like him. I want you all to know, if he needs any kind of help at all, I'll do whatever it takes."

The three of them share another look. This one says, 'We'll talk about this later.'

They were nearly finished with their meals when I sat down. Now they have cleaned their plates and I am still working on my salad. Liz checks her chronometer and says something about needing to get back to work. The others follow suit.

As she passes me on her way to the dish return, Anna squeezes my shoulder.

"The Chief really is proud of you, Rich," she says. "We all are. Just…keep doing what you're doing and let the rest take care of itself, okay?"

I nod vaguely and smile faintly.

"And thanks for the pie."

I grin, feeling good right down to my toes to have made her happy so easily. It's good to hear that the people I respect believe in me, but mostly what I'm doing right now is wondering what in the hell they know that I don't.


	27. 26: The Triumph of Manunkind (General Malcolm Reed)

Ever the disobliging sort, I wait till about nine in the evening before I set the medical staff by the ears.

It’s been a quiet sort of day – well, all my days are quiet lately, so that hardly needed saying – and nobody has noticed anything much, but I’ve been keeping mum about a few things.

(Maybe that should have been ‘keeping dad’, strictly speaking, but at the moment I could be both, so it’s a moot point.)

I’ve already mentioned that life in general is uncomfortable.  Today it’s been steadily ratcheting up from ‘uncomfortable’, and towards the evening it metamorphoses into ‘painful’.  But the machine stays strangely quiet and so I do too, though as time wears on it becomes more and more difficult to keep my breathing slow and even.  If they’d bothered to put a monitor on my jaw it’d probably have kicked off at the number of times I had to clench my teeth, but I flatter myself that that’s about the only thing that would have given me away.

But it’s getting harder and harder and harder not to let even the softest of groans escape me.  The pain is really getting severe now, waves of cramp that set my stomach muscles to iron agony.  I’ve had these before, but managed to ignore them until they went away again.  But these aren’t going away – they’re getting worse.

I’m in labour.

I wonder once or twice if it’d be worth asking if Alice can cook me up a nice plate of fish and chips.  After all, the condemned man is entitled to a hearty last meal, and I could do with something to keep my strength up.  But on the other hand, even if by any remote chance someone decided to humour me, the thought of eating turns me inside out.  I’d probably puke it up if I managed to eat it at all, and poor old Alice doesn’t deserve to have his hard work wasted.  He’d probably walk in here and slap me with a kipper, and I can’t be having with that, not in my present predicament.  I’ve got enough botheration going on without adding to it.

Presently, of course, the one thing happens that I can’t control at all.

My ability to add to my captors’ workload by pissing all over myself has unfortunately been compromised by the humiliating application and regular changing of some very absorbent nappies.  So even though I’ve already reminded myself that this accident is something I must expect, even I am more startled than I ought to be when my belly and groin are suddenly the recipient of a warm gush of fluid, much more than any nappy can be expected to absorb, and the possibility of keeping my status quiet is suddenly over.

The monitors, of course, have been waiting for that.  They kick off in all directions, and the medical staff converge on me like a litter of starving piglets when somebody drops a bucket of swill.  Measurements are taken, notes are made, instructions are given; not to me, of course, but to pretty well everyone else.  There’s a sense of hushed frenzy as they stare down at my now monitor-laden belly, as though only the slenderest of threads is holding them back from plunging forward to tear the child from it by brute force.

I wish they would.  As more time passes, oh, how desperately I wish they would.  Having lain here for so long, I’m as weak as a kitten; muscles that used to be made of steel are now aching rags, unable to withstand the stresses that rip through them.  It grows harder and harder still not to make any sound, though now I can’t help but gasp at the onset of every contraction, and pant at the end of it.

As far as my limited understanding of such things goes, I believe that pain relief is usually offered to women when they go through this.  Nobody offers it to me, and nobody explains why not, though I daresay it’s just that they can’t be arsed.  Either that or they’re worried about it affecting Damien or something.  If I was actually a woman this would probably worry me less, though I suppose I wouldn’t be any more pleased about it; after all, women are designed by nature to survive this sort of thing.  This is a minor flaw as regards _my_ design, and I reckon I’m entitled to feel some concern on that score – having watched a few films where having things bursting out of a chap’s belly has a decidedly negative effect on his wellbeing, it’s not a good thing to be remembering right now.

I suppose that the hormones which have triggered the birth may well have been delivered to me via the damned thing I’m hooked up to.  I don’t know enough about it to have any opinion on that score, and quite frankly right now it’s not uppermost on my mind.  That’s occupied almost exclusively by the sheer physical endurance necessary to cope with the succession of cresting waves of agony that roll through my body, each worse than the last.

An eddy in the crowd around me signals something that registers on the edge of my consciousness.  Through the shuddering tension and the stink of my sweat comes coolness, the smell of crisp white linen sheets.

Of course.  _They_ have to be present for the finale.

I can’t move.  I can’t do a damned thing to help myself bear this, and it’s tearing me apart, tearing me....

I feel the softest touch of cool fingers across my brow, and the breath of a voice: _“Querido...”_

My mouth is as dry as sandpaper, and the room’s so hot it feels as if I’m breathing in plasma exhaust.  If only someone would give me a drop of water to ease the thirst.  I think the Nice ... I think Cutler would have thought of it, but I don't see her here. In my pathetic state I've come think of her as my lucky charm, and maybe it's appropriate that she's not beside me now.

I open my eyes.  Em’s lovelier than ever.  Eyes to drown in.

“Let me sit up,” I gasp.  “Please.  It’s killing me.”  Another contraction roars over me, this one so strong that the world goes away till it’s over.

But I return to a world in which there is no longer a leather strap across my forehead, and my bandaged wrists and ankles register the removal of pressure.  I hear Phlox draw in breath, and a few acolytes take a step backwards; the Devil is loose....

They think I’ve the strength to launch an attack?  They should endure what I’ve endured for the past nearly forty weeks – in particular the last few hours of it.  Then they’d know they’ve fuck-all to worry about from me.  I couldn’t kick shit out of a marshmallow.

But at least I can move.  At least, at last, I can retrieve the dignity of being the master of my own destiny.  If only in one, small, thing....

I have very little time.  The contractions are coming so fast now that I have only a few seconds before the next will be upon me.

I have to sit up.

I don’t have the strength.  My body weighs a ton, my reflexes are gone, my muscles are wet rags.

I fumble a hand for the side of the bed, with the steel bar that anchored my wrist restraints.

Tucker’s ramblings are loud in my head as my little finger slips under the bar, feeling for a microswitch.

Something moves under my fingertip.

The next contraction hits.  I writhe, helpless, graceless.  Nobody will touch me, nobody will help me, except that I suppose they’d intervene if they thought I was going to pitch forward on my face on the floor and squash the little bastard flat as it slithers out of me.

_Damien is coming_.

As it ebbs, I dream.  I walk the corridors of _Enterprise_ , and people smile at me.  Tucker walks into my quarters, bottles hanging casually from his fingers.

It’s only a dream.  But if the dream could ever become a reality, it won’t do so in Alpha’s world.

I salvage the last dregs of my strength and struggle upright, dragging my legs to drop over the edge of the bed. With that, I’m finished.  I could never stand up.  Although the highly volatile coolant gas the microswitch released is odourless, it irritates the eyes.  Maybe that’s why mine are stinging as I look across into bright blue coins.

During the dreaming, I learned what I could have been.  Now there is only the question of what that other me would do without hesitation were he here now.

There’s a panel right behind my feet.  In the midst of the tide of technical garbage, Tucker said he would leave it with an open circuit right behind the vent.  The slightest pressure on the panel will close the gap between the contacts – but not quite enough for them to touch.

I think that right at the last second Em knows.  Her mouth softens, as though she might be about to blow me a kiss.

Then my foot slams backward, and the circuit arcs.

* * *

* * *

Extensive author's note by Mandassina ahead…

* The title of this chapter is derived from a coined word in an e.e. cummings poem. When I first chose it, I was looking at the destruction of Damien as a victory for mankind (read humanity) but I chose cumming's word, manunkind, because it's the MU. Man is not kind in the MU, and Malcolm is particularly nasty. That's _all_ I was thinking about, that _one_ word in the first line, then I went off and read the poem, just to make sure there was nothing in it that would make it a bad fit for this story. And holy guacamole! Does it ever work!

Here's the poem, and my thoughts on how it fits with the story follow.

 

_pity this busy monster, manunkind,_

_not. Progress is a comfortable disease:_

_your victim (death and life safely beyond)_

_plays with the bigness of his littleness_

_\--- electrons deify one razorblade_

_into a mountainrange; lenses extend_

_unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish_

_returns on its unself._

_A world of made_

_is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh_

_and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this_

_fine specimen of hypermagical_

_ultraomnipotence. We doctors know_

_a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell_

_of a good universe next door; let's go_

Now, this poem was published in 1944, more than two decades before TOS first aired, so I realize it is a conceit to relate it to this work of fan fiction. I can't really say the poem had any influence on the story, either, since I'm not aware of thinking about it at all until I chose to reference it in this chapter title. As for my co-writer, she never mentioned it. Still, I can't deny the connections I see between the two works.

The first line of the poem is "pity this busy monster, manunkind, / not." That's MU Reed in a nutshell: busy making people miserable, monstrous by any definition, a most unkind man, and certainly not to be pitied. By comparison to the Prime U, it describes to some extent _all_ of humanity in the MU, and yet, that 'not' actually falls on the next line almost as an afterthought. In the context of the story, it's as if the speaker does feel compassion for manunkind, but then remembers how horrible people are in the MU and decides what whatever's happening to them, they've brought it on themselves and deserve whatever they get. Perhaps he or she remembers what Liz said about Malcolm not having learned his monstrous ways out of some book and is struggling to reconcile Liz and Trip's points of view. Perhaps the speaker in the poem can deny the manunkind of the MU _pity_ , but not _sympathy_.

A little more than halfway through the poem, cummings tells us, "A world of made / is not a world of born ---" I think this dovetails nicely with the sprog growing inside Malcolm. That creature was 'made' somehow. There is nothing natural about its conception, and its birth was bound to be equally contrived. It would always have been a manufactured thing, a powerful alien being in the xenophobic Empire it was conceived to rule.

"We doctors know / a hopeless case..." Connects on three levels. First, it makes me think of Phlox, really only because the word doctor is in there. He should have known his experiment was hopeless, not in the sense that it is doomed to fail, but in the sense that if it succeeds, it could kill all hope for just about everyone in the Empire. The creature created was bred to be a killing machine, and if it has Alpha's powers, it would likely have been, as Reed suggested, the end of humanity. Second, it references the hopelessness of life in the Empire in general. What a dismal life it must be to only advance by trampling others beneath you! How dreadful then to have to watch your back every moment to be sure someone isn't behind you ready to shove you out an air lock or slip a blade between your ribs! Finally, it ties in with the hopelessness of Malcolm's situation. It's really hard to say whether he isn't better off dead. He was so physically depleted that he'd never have been able to fend for himself, and once he was neutralized, there was no chance Alpha would ever let him get his physical strength back, let alone any kind of power in the Empire. At least in death, he got revenge on his tormentors. Had he lived, he would simply have continued to suffer as a lab rat, at least until Alpha gifted him to Phlox for a vivisection project.

The last bit, "listen: there's a hell / of a good universe next door; let's go" made me laugh aloud. Isn't that exactly what MU Trip (and Liz, Kelby, Hess, Rostov, possibly T'Pol, and maybe even Malcolm, at this point) would say about the Prime U? To me, the words 'let's go' in particular correspond to Trip's wrestling with the concepts of decency and justice, mercy and love. These could be the first tentative steps toward that 'good' universe.


	28. 27: Epilogue

_“Commodore!”_

I don’t need the yell, of course.  I should think everyone on the station would have felt the shock go through the superstructure.

“Damage report!” I rap out.

Mitcheson studies the screen and turns back to me, his face pale.  “Sir, the – the medical facility – it’s gone!”

“What the hell d’you mean, ‘gone’?” Of course, I know exactly what he means, maybe better than he does, but he doesn't know that.

“It – it’s just _gone!_ ” He points to the screen.  There’s a fucking huge hole where the medical facility used to be.  The only plus is that the external hull didn’t blow out with it. I was lucky on that score, but then it was built to take practically anything an accident inside could throw at it.

Fire suppressant systems have gone into action at once, of course, and emergency bulkheads confined the damage.  Only those inside will have been caught in the blast, and the salvage teams won’t be looking for survivors.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I say softly, very much to myself; and I think a few things.  Then, much more loudly, I become the commanding officer I am, issuing crisp orders for salvage and repair teams to attend the site immediately.  All reports are to be given to me directly, and I’ll be the one who gets in touch with the Empress and tells her what she needs to know.  _Exactly_ and _only_ what she needs to know, and not before it's to my advantage to tell her.

This naturally won’t include the details of certain modifications I made during that last visit to Sickbay.  I’ve no doubt that as soon as she’s done sending out orders for Empire-wide mourning she’ll be dancing the fandango round her throne room, but if someone’s going to be the scapegoat for this it’s not going to be me.  There were enough med-techs in there, I’ll just pick one to take the blame; after all, there’s not going to be anyone left alive to contradict me. If I can make the time, I'll scan their personnel files and try to pick someone with no family back on earth to suffer the consequences of such a devastating error – it will always be surrounded by a question of treason. Or maybe I'll download the files to T'Pol's PADD and let her do it. She would undoubtedly arrive at the most logical choice, and while she might figure out that she's really just covering my ass, there's no way she'll be able to prove it. I made damned sure of that.

Later, maybe, the Empress will realise she needs powerful support, and with the Jupiter yards under my thumb and half the Fleet crewed by officers loyal to me, well ... she’s a realist.  Always was.  And given the way she humped her way from one CO to the next, she must be something else in bed.

I’m not a fool and neither is Hoshi.  With the Triad gone, there’s a power vacuum.  There’ll be some big sharks circling.  This situation could hardly be more dangerous, but I’m guessing that for a while there’ll be a bit of a pause while the contestants weigh up each other’s strengths and jockey for position.

Jupiter Station gives me power.  Enough to be one of the sharks?  Maybe.  But whether I’d want to step up that high is something else.  If a sneaky bastard like Reed could get knifed in the back, I’m not sure I want to find out what my chances of survival would be – and besides, if I’m honest, I like it fine where I am.

Then again, Ensign Baird's little masterpiece of programming has given me so many more options. I _could_ play puppet master from right here on Jupiter Station, at least until I get enough of my people installed in high-ranking positions to … well, whatever happened next would depend a lot on how cooperative Hoshi would be.

...Reed, though.  Even as I’m pretending to be totally shocked and dismayed by what’s happened, just like everyone else, a part of me is puzzling away at the one part of all this that really surprises me.

Sure, he got a shit deal.  That’s part of life in the Empire.  I don’t think he could have been all that shocked by it; fact is, he could have done worse.  The other two could just have had him killed out of hand.  As it was, they tried to fit him into their plans, and he had a chance to live – a chance that for his own reasons he chose not to take.

That’s what I can’t get a handle on.  He was a survivor, Reed.  What did he really mean, ‘End of Humanity’?  Was it true?  Was that why he needed a way out, or was it just because he found he had a heart after all and had just gotten it broken at last?

Did they have to die, or did he just want to take them with him?

Anyway, I won’t pretend I won’t sleep easier without that Alpha prowling the corridors.  Those eyes ... they gave me the creeps.  Gomez – well, yeah, it’s kind of a pity she had to go.  She was a real pin-up girl, and I’d sure have liked to have peeled her out of her pants if she’d ever given me the green light, but I’m guessing she was far too far gone with whatever schemes Ol’ Blue Eyes had going or she’d never have turned on Reed like she did.  As for the breeding program, that was on a ‘Need to know’ basis.  I didn’t need to know, and I didn’t want to know.  I was more than happy just being the grease monkey who kept their equipment running.  Up to a point.  Thing is, I can’t even say for sure what that point was, only that I passed it, and things changed, and, like it or not, I couldn’t do much else than go with them.

The rest of the shift passes in a blur.  The blast did a lot of damage.  It takes more than two hours before the external hull’s declared completely intact, and only then can work start on picking over the wreckage in the medical facility.

“No survivors, sir.”  The report comes just a few minutes before I sign off.  It just confirms what I already knew, but we have to go through the motions.

I'm sure, somewhere, if she wasn't caught up in the blast, Liz Cutler is mad enough to chew nails and spit tacks. As much as I want to see her right now and know she's okay, I don't know what I'm going to say to her. But I am certain of one thing, now, more than ever: Daddy was right. What they were doing to Reed was a crime. No one, not even he, could ever deserve what they did to him. Even a man like Malcolm Reed deserves protection from some things, but the best I would offer him was release.

“Standard salvage orders,” I command.  They’ve taken body bags.  Whatever can be found will be put into them, and there won’t be a lot of it.  Maybe later someone will decide whether to sort the pieces, test DNA to confirm whose they are. Wouldn't be the first time someone's decided to go AWOL during a disaster only to turn up months or years later in some rebel cell or draft-dodger enclave. Even with DNA testing, the Empire doesn't usually expend its resources hunting down deserters. It pays bounty hunters to do that, though I suppose if someone like Reed or I were to go missing, it would be another matter. At any rate, that decision’s above my pay grade, and I don’t suppose anyone’ll go to the bother of opening the coffins during the State funerals.

Everything goes smoothly into action.  I wait long enough to see the first shots of the devastation inside the facility, and then I’m too tired to watch any longer.  I send off a coded message to the Empress and say I’ll send the details tomorrow – once I’ve carefully decided exactly _which_ details, of course, though I diplomatically omit that bit.  Then I hand over to the Beta Shift officer and make my way wearily to my quarters.

T’Pol’s crept on to my bed.  She must be deeply asleep, because she doesn’t wake as the door opens.  She looks defenseless.  Kind of like Reed looked, lying there like a beaten dog.

She’s not so deeply asleep that instinct doesn’t wake her as the bed dips under my weight.  Just a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t even have looked at her face, only at the body lying there available for me.  Heck, she’s a Vulcan rebel, she should be thankful she’s still alive.  Whatever the terms.  (And let’s face it, she had other choices – she just decided I was the best bet going.  Considering that most of the others involved a lengthy interview with Reed, I was no more flattered than I was surprised, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to look a gift Vulcan in the mouth.)

Why should things be different now?

I don’t know, but they are.  The fear I still glimpse in her face before she's fully alert and able to conceal it wakes a wash of muddy emotions in me – one of which I recognize as a sort of shame.  Life on any terms _isn’t_ the most important thing.  How weird is it, how ironic to laughable, that it had to be Reed who taught me that.

Normally she comes into the shower with me when I clean up (mixing business with pleasure, I guess you’d call it), so she’s expecting that, but I gesture to the shower room.  “I guess you’d like to clean yourself up.” And something makes me add, “Alone.”

She’s not buying it, but while she might not be afraid of me all the time now, she's too well trained to disobey an order.  She sidles around to slide off the bed, clearly waiting for the grab, and I won’t deny it, old habit’s strong: she’s lovely, she’s naked, she’s mine and I know she’ll just lie back and think of Vulcan if I snap my fingers.  She doesn't dare think about trying anything different, even now, because I might let her read and watch a little TV and a few movies, and I might even ask her opinion about a sticky problem now and then, but she's not my partner, she's my property, and she still knows her place.

But I don’t snap and I don’t grab.  I look the other way and pretend I don’t know how dubiously she watches me as she tiptoes towards the bathroom.  The door closes with hardly a sound, as though she’s afraid that any loud noise will bring me down on her like the horny bastard I’ve always been.

When I hear the water start running I lean forward and press the comm. button.  “Eloise, fetch me a clean change of clothes.  Women’s clothes.  Somethin' ... well, just somethin' respectable.”

I sign off before she can ask any damn-fool questions.

What’s gotten into me tonight, anyway?

I walk to the viewing port.

I hardly ever bother looking out at the stars; it’s not like they change, they’re always there. I never wanted to live among them anyway. But tonight, for some reason, I find myself thinking they’re beautiful.

‘End of Humanity’.  What _did_ he mean?  Did I get it wrong, and was he just half out of his mind with the drugs they must have pumped him with?  Did he mean humanity with a capital letter, or a lower-case one?

Either way, it’s something I never thought I’d hear on his lips.  Made a whole lot of difference to what came next.  Maybe it’ll make even more differences than that – who knows?

And strangely enough, it’s made a difference even to me.  I listen to the water splattering in the shower, and rather than thinking of what I’m missing, the thought comes to me that maybe it’s not just in the workplace that a little gentleness can make a difference... a little ‘humanity’.

Even if the capital letter’s way out of my league, maybe I could try just a little of the lower-case variety.  See how we get on.  Because tonight, the world feels strangely cleaner than it ever did before.

It feels like a world for dreams.

 

**The End.**

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Reviews are always really appreciated!


End file.
